What is Planning?
Planning includes a range of processes for determining an organisation’s goals. Planning
Budgeting & Forecasting – this is the process for agreeing an organisation’s
short-term financial and non-financial objectives. The difference between budgets and
- Budgets lay out the plan for what the business wants to achieve, budgets are
normally prepared once per year at the end of the financial year and related to
next year’s performance.
- Forecasts state the business actual expectations for results and are composed of
actual (real performance) and future figures. As the year progresses, the
organisation revisits the budget in line of real performance and prepares
forecasts that show deviations on the original budget.
Financial Consolidation – this is the process of consolidating financial and
non-financial data from various business entities within an organisation and rolling it
up to a parent company for statutory and non-statutory reporting purposes.
Strategic Planning – this is the process to define the organisation’s long-term
goals, normally involving a five to ten-year horizon.
Other Planning – such as Capex Planning, Human Resource Planning, and Sales
The common challenge in Planning is that most organisations have inefficient processes
involving manual collation and consolidation of data with outdated systems – believe it
or not, in many large organisations, Excel is still the tool in use for Planning and
Consolidation. Use of wrong technology can lead to loss of time in populating and
consolidating data, inaccurate figures due to copy and paste in Excel, poor reporting,