Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) is a crucial part of scheduling. When multiple people are involved in the planning process, it’s typical that there will be significant overlaps. Planning can be confusing and convoluted. Without a proper system, it can be difficult to pinpoint where problems are to address them. Planning and forecasting need to be incorporated into an enterprise’s work processes. SAP Analytics Cloud is a solution that attempts to integrate FP&A into a business’s processes seamlessly. Since more and more companies are moving towards cloud-based processing and storage, SAP Analytics Cloud is the best option for businesses wanting to make FP&A more present in their business processes. But why choose to go with a cloud solution?

The Cloud Brings Benefits

As most already know, cloud solutions are affordable, scalable, and remove the onus of owning hardware from the company. As a customer, your cloud usage can be tracked, and you only pay for the amount you use. Several businesses have realized that cloud integration gives their business a lot more flexibility. Employees can utilize the cloud to work remotely or access secure data on the company’s secure servers. There’s no need to worry about hardware failure or corrupted databases, as cloud storage is resilient and always available. Instead of hosting an on-premise solution, the business can outsource its storage and processing needs to the cloud provider for a reasonable fee.

What the SAP Analytics Cloud Offers

SAP designed the Analytics Cloud to utilize businesses’ vast amounts of data. Through this collected data, companies can garner insight into their current processes and design plans around predictions generated by the engine. The projections are based on past performance, so they may sometimes not apply. However, most of the time, a business can successfully spot trends in buyer motivation or sales figures over the year. FP&A is a way for the Analytics Cloud to push its recommendations to logistics and planning departments quickly and easily.

FP&A Tools can offer handy updates to businesses through:

• Create agile, integrated financial plans, utilizing several scenarios for real-world data to create a comprehensive overall plan
• Determine how certain decisions made today could impact the company over weeks or months
• Look at the current situation of the company’s financial health and predict methods of improving it if necessary
• Spot new potential revenue sources and determine which revenue sources currently existing are at risk
• Develop budget plans on a per-department basis while keeping the overall financial health of the business in focus

As part of the SAP suite, FP&A is a unique methodology for approaching financial planning. With the right integrations, businesses can link the FP&A module with other governance and risk modules which form part of the overall SAP family of products. Alternatively, for their financial planning and analytics, companies can use FP&A as a standalone solution alongside cloud hosting through dedicated servers. It’s time to move beyond spreadsheets to calculate financial data that might be using arbitrary numbers. SAP’s integration offers hard facts, giving you a better basis for making financial decisions to benefit the company.