Financial Planning & Analysis Software Providers 10 Most Promising Financial Planning & Analysis Software Providers 10 Most Promising Financial Planning & Analysis Software Providers W CORpORatE FInanCE tECHnOlOGY SpECIal The Navigator for Enterprise Solutions apRIl - 2014 CIOREVIEW.COM In My Opinion Thomas W. Sweet SVP & CFO, Dell Inc CFO Viewpoints Fran Shammo EVP & CFO, Verizon Communications Bob Swan SVP, Finance & CFO, eBay Wade D. Miquelon CFO & President- International, Walgreens BOARD International: Taking Budgeting and Planning to a New High Giovanni Grossi CEO |1 | CIOReview march 2014 hile corporate strategy helps determine the long-range vision for a company, the business environment is constantly changing, leaving a questionable impact on optimizing efficiency and effectiveness in a firm’s current operations. To help finance sectors to cope with agility and performance ratio, many companies are coming up with financial planning and analysis software solutions, which provide key financial modeling capabilities to help companies meet their budgeting and ongoing forecasting needs. With the assistance of new technologies, the vendors create tools with which the businesses can easily access comprehensive financial reports and metrics that give a unique perspective into the operations. The software provides complete overview into an organization, with budgets that include costs, deadlines, deliverables, workflows, and summaries. It is now time for finance to demonstrate how it can support business strategy, competitive analysis, overall enterprise performance planning and management, and drive revenue and profit growth. In the last few months we have looked at hundreds of solution providers who primarily serve the finance industry, and shortlisted the ones that are at the forefront of tackling challenges faced by this industry. In our selection we looked at the vendor’s capability to fulfill the needs of the finance sector through the supply of a variety of financial planning and analysis softwares that support core business processes, including innovation areas related to cloud, mobile, Saas, PaaS and ERP, Big Data and analytics, mobility, and social media in the specific context of the finance industry. We present to you CIOReview’s 10 Most Promising Financial Planning and Analysis Software Providers 2014. Company: Description: Centage Centage is a growing software company that provides, automated budgeting, planning, and forecasting software. It is designed for small to mid-market companies and automates many of the time-consuming and error-prone activities associated with using spreadsheets to generate accurate budgets and forecasts. Key Person: Barry Clapp President | CIOReview April 2014 Centage Maestro of Budgeting Solutions “B udgeting in Excel is a bear. It is a tedious and timeconsuming process, in which companies typically end up passing around spreadsheets that can generate multiple iterations and become hard to reconcile,” says Barry Clapp, President and COO of Centage—a leading provider of automated budgeting and forecasting software solutions. Headquartered in Natick, MA, Centage develops software that helps its clients achieve unprecedented accuracy and efficiency in their financial planning and reporting processes. The company’s easy-to-use and scalable budgeting, planning, and forecasting solutions allow small to mid-market firms to automate many of their time-consuming and error-prone activities associated with spreadsheet budgeting, and generate accurate budgets and forecasts. The Maestro suite is made up of three integrated solutions. Their flagship product, Budget Maestro ® is a giant leap beyond spreadsheets; this software delivers extraordinary efficiency, deep visibility and increased agility to help their clients manage financial health of their organization. By simplifying the task of data collection, with built-in GAAP compliant business and financial logic via wizards, spread methods, and drop-down menus, Budget Maestro dramatically shortens budget cycle time as well as improves accuracy and relevance of results. It’s also the only solution that provides integrated projected cash flow, income statement and balance sheet statements that reflect your plans, what-if-scenarios, and actuals. Analytics Maestro, an integral module of the Maestro suite, offers users a clear graphic representation of gaps between budget and actual data to help drive better decision making and increased accountability throughout the organization. It allows users the ability to create their own visual dashboards and reports with the most relevant, accurate, and upto-date information, customized to meet their changing needs. The solution facilitates selfserve analytics and reporting by empowering users to refresh reports on-demand and drilldown to detail, eliminating the need for external consultants or IT support. The third module of the suite, Link Maestro, offers bi-directional integration with your ERP/General Ledger, allowing users to seamlessly load budget and forecast versions from your G/L into Barry Clapp Budget Maestro, preserving their existing chart of accounts and structure. These integrated solutions enable Centage to provide its clients, unprecedented visibility into their key activities that are driving financial statements. Talking about the benefits of Centage’s products customer Daniel Lien, general manager at the Office of Strategic Management, Wagner Asia said, “Like many companies, Wagner Asia relied on spreadsheets as its ‘budgeting software’. With Budget Maestro we were able to overcome the usual headaches of budgeting with spreadsheets—challenges Budgeting in Excel is a tedious, time-consuming and errorprone process consolidating budgets, questionable data, broken macros, and writing formulas to develop a comprehensive budget in a matter of weeks, instead of what previously took months.” Link Maestro enabled us to deploy seamless data integration, secure data transfer, and automate import of the resources at any time to plan, budget and forecast. It eliminated the potential for human error, importing, and keying numbers. In addition, the unprecedented level of granularity offered by the tool, allowed us to dig deep into our individual divisions, gain valuable insight, and more strategically manage the business,” he adds. Moving forward, Centage aims to simplify the tools that it offers and continue to enhance the user experience, making it easier for non-financial users to contribute to the budget process and see the impact of their recommendations as they are making them. Centage also plans to venture into cloud solutions and expand its business intelligence expertise so that more people can drill through and carry out better analysis of their actual performance whether in the home office, at a customer, or on the road. | CIOReview April 2014