3 Steps to Leveraging Scenario Planning to Build Resilience
When it comes to your business, it is critical to be prepared for any financial challenge. Now more than ever, it is imperative that you can make quick and informed decisions based on your business’s cash data. Leveraging scenario planning allows businesses to prepare for everything from supply chain disruptions to managing cash and liquidity.
In a recent webinar the founder and CEO of Trovata, Brett Turner, discussed the benefits of scenario planning and how Trovata enables companies like yours to create accurate reports and cash flow forecasts. Brett is a long-time CFO and has spent his entire career in finance at both public and private high-growth companies – CPA at Deloitte; Controller roles; SEC Reporting at Amazon; and CFO of three tech startups since 2005.
New to the world of scenario planning? Click here to read our blog “Scenario Planning Explained”.
What are the Benefits of Automated Scenario Planning?
- Easy access to high-quality data and artificial intelligence (AI) enables you to easily build more accurate forecasts
- Proactively assess the business’s ability to withstand disruption and to avoid cash shortages
- Gain a competitive advantage by anticipating and quickly reacting to financial challenges
Achieve Greater Accuracy and Efficiency in Forecasting
When it comes to scenario planning, the traditional methods of preparing data fall flat. Manually aggregating, normalizing, and inputting data from dozens of banks and accounts takes time away from analysis. Inaccuracies and slow report generation diminish the value of scenario planning and hinder decision making.
For scenario planning to be effective, finance professionals need to be able to quickly gather and process large amounts of data. This is where AI, machine learning (ML), and application programming interfaces (APIs) can help businesses rapidly collect and standardize high volumes of data.
ML algorithms are capable of automating much of the scenario planning process and enable you to spend your time analyzing and communicating results with leadership. Financial departments leveraging AI are able to develop stronger, more reliable forecasts and better anticipate cash flows by identifying trends in historical cash data. APIs eliminate time spent on data aggregation by completely automating the collection process.
These technological advancements add an extra level of actionable insight to traditional scenario-based forecasts, helping financial professionals create highly tailored reports. This level of granular reporting is instrumental in monitoring and maintaining a healthy cash flow.
Proactively Assess the Business’s Ability to Withstand Disruption
“Scenario planning forces you to be inquisitive and engage with others outside of accounting, finance, treasury. It forces you to learn about the business. That’s the only way to know the important parts of your business, the vulnerabilities, and what can be affected. You can choose to simply respond, or lean in and be proactive.”
-Brett Turner, Trovata CEO
It is all about future-proofing your data strategy. The most important thing to do is to ensure that your department has easy access to the data they need. Automation workflows and APIs ensure that your team can easily access cash data and that the separate departments are all working off of the same data set.
Manual data collection delays will leave the business making decisions based on outdated information. Ultimately, this can force a business to react to disruptions instead of allowing ample time to prepare for cash shortages.
Gain a Competitive Advantage
During the webinar, just over 75% of attendees said that their finance team still relies on Excel for their scenario planning. Without automated cash management workflows, it is much harder for businesses to quickly pivot and respond to “black swan” events like the COVID-19 pandemic.
When finance professionals like you are relieved of data collection duties, it becomes much easier to quickly create a plan of action based on real-time data. This extra time to react and improved forecast quality allows your business to gain an edge over your competitors.
Creating cash reports on demand also allows business leaders like you to quickly answer what-if questions like:
- How much cash do we have across all of our banks?
- What is going on with our cash in terms of cash flow analysis, historical trends?
- Where is our cash going?
Automated scenario planning combines the latest advances in cash management to provide you with high quality, targeted cash insights.
Trovata makes it easy for businesses to automate cash workflows like cash reporting, cash flow analysis, and cash forecasting. By bridging the gap between banks and accounting systems, Trovata is helping companies gain powerful insights into their cash flows that drive better and quicker business decisions. With our direct bank API connections to most major banks, new clients can get set up in just a few hours.
Want to see what Trovata can do for you? Request a demo today.
