5 Ways Oracle Cloud EPM Benefits Your Budgeting and Planning

Once your business is operational, planning and budgeting are the two critical pillars that help you track your business’s overall success and security.

 
Closing the books has never been simple yet is one of the essential processes to follow for your business to be on track. Many companies use spreadsheets and manual entries for financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting, making it one of the slowest, error-prone, hard to audit and inconvenient ways to manage the accounting process. Every business wants to predict the best possible outcomes and make informed decisions for optimal business performance.

An automated cloud application like Oracle EPM Cloud can help you say goodbye to disconnected spreadsheets, manual entries, and processes and provide the business stakeholders and finance managers with a platform that can help them help you. Planning and budgeting can’t be a stand-alone process. IT requires timely and accurate data, inputs and reports from different parts of the organization. Oracle EPM planning and budgeting cloud services (PBCS) align the needs of corporate finance and operational planners around the enterprise, i.e., sales, marketing, HR, IT, and the lines of business. Now, you and your team can spend more time running your business, bringing in new ideas and strategies to grow your revenue and less time, maintaining planning processes.

Let us understand the key benefits that Oracle PBCS enables for your people and your company:
 

1. Automation

   Oracle Cloud EPM enables you to automate specific routine tasks like scheduling reports sent out to stakeholders or importing and exporting metadata. Automation helps you eliminate manual errors, long filing hours and delays. During the monthly and financial year-end, closing books accurately and on time is necessary.

   A lot of tasks related to financial closure and reconciliation, once automated, leave a lot of room for the finance and accounting stakeholders to focus on more value-based, strategic tasks. Instead of data verification, manipulation, and reconciliation, finance professionals can use their time in analyzing and planning actions accordingly. This enables the executives to look ahead and observe the forthcoming opportunities more keenly. EPM gives you visibility across all your lines of business, along with the cost and profit performance of each business pillar either independently or combined. This functionality can be used to formulate integrated, agile forecasts that will help you respond to economic changes in the marketplace while sustaining your business in the long term.

   With EPM Cloud, now create your own custom planning and forecasting models or get up and running quickly with purpose-built planning models that include prebuilt calculations, dashboards and reports. This is easy to understand, use and maintain for anyone. You can optimize your revenue plan, advance planning for expenses and analyze your balance sheet anytime. Dashboard views give you an overview of key information using slices of data from across the application.

 

2. Compliance with Regulatory Bodies

   The legal and regulatory compliance environment changes often.  Especially with security issues and concerns arising every hour, your company’s financial policies should match global standards. With Cloud EPM, you don’t need to stress to keep yourself up to date and enforce international security standards and guidelines in your systems. Oracle provides information about frameworks for which it has achieved a third-party attestation/certification. Thus, quarterly automatic system updates take care of changing policies and reinforce your organization’s compliance with the guidelines.

   Government brings frequent reforms in tax laws to which you must adjust your financial processes, payments, and invoicing. The Cloud EPM platform takes care of adjusting your processes to changed tax policies and connects processes with data and metadata accordingly. It then automatically reflects the changes in the financial reports, planning, and budgeting system.

 

3. Faster financial decisions during disruption

   With the growing technology, companies have started recognizing that the finance leaders can add value to the strategic decision-making process unlike in the past when finance and accounting practice heads were viewed as contributors to income statements, balance sheets, reporting and producing profit and loss records. Now, the finance team’s work starts when they hand over profit and loss statements to interrogate deeper level business questions. EPM Cloud can make it possible to shut down the grunt work still bogging these teams down and empower the finance associates with a strong application platform easing their workload and manual executions.

   The Cloud EPM modernized solution enables you to connect all the business verticals and plan across the organization at a granular level, which provides the speed and agility required to stand strong amid unforeseen disruption. You can make informed decisions with clear forecasts, planning, budgeting report and a quick insight into your finance that ensure you not just survive but thrive through!

   Furthermore, you can simulate various scenarios for expected and unexpected events like business model changes, M&A, and economic disruptions. This helps you identify and accommodate outliers for smooth planning and forecast.

 

4. Out of the box functional value

   The EPM Cloud brings in features such as “out-of-box planning” content that is not just unsupported ’starter templates’ from an ‘app store’. Instead, they are innovative new modules that can be tailored to cater to your business-specific needs yet remain upgradable by Oracle.

   Do you think your planning and budgeting processes are too unique for out-of-box planning content? It’s not an ‘all or nothing’ decision with planning & budgeting. Taking advantage of configuration ‘mash-ups’ allows you to combine configured processes with pre-built planning components from Oracle. The library of pre-built planning/budgeting components such as models, dashboards, reports, KPIs and planning accelerators continues to grow. Powerful analytics, dashboards, what-if, and predictive capabilities give you the unparalleled insight your business needs.

 

5. Full Integration with Oracle Cloud ERP

   If Cloud ERP is about centralized management of day-to-day operations, EPM Cloud is about reporting and analysis. Hence, EPM Cloud goes hand in hand with ERP Cloud. And that’s why integration between the two mammoth processes of a business is extremely critical. Both the cloud modules integrate with each other seamlessly providing an option to choose a solution that meets the business need, all while maintaining the ease and upgradability of a cloud-based planning solution.

   Instead of bringing various single-point solutions for your planning, budgeting, and forecasting, and reporting, Oracle Cloud EPM provides an edge by offering a complete suite of capabilities under one solution. It integrates with the data flowing in from various departments and verticals and offers summarized/consolidated financial data for analysis. Oracle connects data across your organization, whether HR, finance, marketing, operations, or sales. This helps you forecast numbers based on a 360-degree view of the entire organization, and any change to the system can be predicted easily.

   Oracle Cloud EPM offers dedicated solutions for account reconciliation, tax reporting, and other financial level reporting consolidation leveraged by machine learning and automation.

Are you ready to automate your process and lower the total cost of ownership (TCO)?

Looking forward to moving your on-prem solutions or wanting to adopt application transformation? The Datavail on-prem and cloud expert team can help you with a quick assessment to analyze where your business currently stands, your current system state, and your process issues/challenges helping you with an end-to-end transformation plan. We are an experienced team with over 1000+ implementation expertise in the Oracle space as an Oracle Partner and a Cloud Excellence Implementer.

As an example, one of Datavail’s clients who is a leading consolidator of flatbed transportation and a growth company in North America faced consistency, security and SOX compliance issues due to diverse independent legacy financial systems across their operating companies. Download our case study to learn how they achieved compliance needs with flexibility, scalability and predictive planning which helped them outperform the volatile market condition. They also digitized finance to automate millions of transactions.

You can also reach out to the Datavail team to get your free assessment and expert support. We want to be there for you and your organization.