The mere-exposure effect is a phenomenon where humans develop a fondness for things simply because they’re familiar with them. The more that we become familiar with something, there’s a comfort that makes it harder to consider alternatives.
If you stick to a process because you’re familiar with it might be holding you back from your full potential.
With financial planning and analysis (FP&A), you might feel comfortable depending on your trusty Excel skillset to provide value to your clients. But there are drawbacks but could be preventing you from working efficiently or creating extra work taking you from the high value aspects of your service.
To level up your FP&A and maximize the return on your services, it may be time to leave your sheets behind.
Where Excel Falls Short in FP&A
Manual Processes
While formulas and a bit of Excel wizardry can minimize the workload behind maintaining different sheets, there’s always going to be a manual process to keep things updated.Manual processes affect you in three major ways:
- Unnecessary labor: Updating Excel takes time that gets in the way of doing analysis or meeting the needs of your clients. If someone reaches out with a question, you need to sink time into updates before answering.
- Potential errors: Human error is an inevitability and it can impact the accuracy of the data. One mistake that isn’t caught means a thorough review looking for that “needle in the haystack” error.
- Lack of real-time data: The insights you get from financial reporting shouldn’t be shackled by outdated data. You want to minimize the time between thinking of possible insight and finding the answer for yourself.
These shortcomings create timesinks of updating data, adjusting formulas, and searching for errors that keep you from delivering the true value of your FP&A services.
Breaking Formulas and Layouts
There’s a bit of experimentation and tinkering behind the formulas that make up Excel sheets and templates. Once you get it where you want, it’s devastating when something breaks it and it’s right back to the experimentation phase.
This is especially true of Excel sheets shared with clients where one troublesome click or keystroke can undo hours of work.
While Excel is powerful and customizable with some know-how, it can also be a bit of a house of cards with how everything is interconnected. Compare that to FP&A software where you have templates to build off of and customization that doesn’t depend on restructuring formulas and formats manually.
Laborsome Customization For Clients
At the heart of FP&A services is the interest of your clients. What your services look like will differ based on the industry, goals, and areas of interest of each individual client.
To service these differences, the tools you use should be tailored to each client’s needs and wants. That means reworking Excel sheets to track essential metrics, editing the presentation to highlight the most important data first, and refining the appearance so it’s presentable.
This process takes time and prevents you from delivering value right out of the gate. Compare that to software that features customizable templates that cut that work down considerably, allowing you to get straight to the planning and analysis.
While your clients are hiring you for the long haul, providing value right away shows them how committed you are to assisting.
Lack of Scalability
The more you depend on Excel, the more labor that’s required to onboarding clients and provide the usual deliverables. This time requirement puts a restrictive cap on how many clients can be serviced without increasing headcount.
If you want to achieve sustainable growth, you need scalable processes that work as efficiently with 100 clients as they would with 10 clients.
If you don’t have a scalable process, you’ll reach a point in your growth trajectory where you have to scrap everything and build from scratch.
The earlier you invest in creating a scalable process, the less you have to worry about when your systems will become insufficient to meet your needs.
What to Look For In An Excel Alternative
Prebuilt Templates
When switching to a new platform, the last thing you want is to start from scratch. You want out-of-the-box solutions that speed up your time to value.
But there’s a big difference between offering some basic templates that are adequate for all businesses as opposed to specialized templates for different use cases.
Look for an option that has prebuilt, industry-specific templates for dashboards, financial statements, budgeting, and planning to save you from making countless edits before something feels fitting for a client.
Even if the templates aren’t perfect for a client, they are easier to reshape than an Excel sheet which requires rebuilding formulas that require reworking before they do what you want them to.
Data Integration
Minimize the manual upkeep with a platform that integrates with the tools you already use. If you can find an FP&A software that integrates with your accounting platform, you’re saving yourself from having to do the same thing twice.
Integrations also cut down on potential mistakes. You’ll know with certainty that the data in one platform is the exact same as the other.
Some of these connections can be done in Excel, but require expert-level know-how. If it’s not something you already know how to do, it’s a hefty undertaking to learn how.
Rolling Forecasts and Variance Analysis
Budgets and rolling forecasts are the backbone of FP&A services. These are aspects of the service that need to be constantly updated so the business knows when they need to change their strategy.
In Excel, this is extremely time consuming. You need to update each aspect of a business’s spend and financial performance manually, cross-referencing numbers on different platforms.
Tailormade FP&A software does all this lift for you. Rather than making manual updates, you get to jump straight into the analysis helping your clients stay agile and make changes on the fly.
Streamlined Scenario Planning
Building off of forecasts is scenario planning. Scenario planning is an amazing way of showing your clients different potential outcomes and having different strategies for each. However, scenario planning can turn into a massive time sink as your clients start to request different potential outcomes to test for.
With a manual process like Excel, you’re forced to find a balance point between how many scenarios to plan for and how much time you invest into scenario planning.
When you transition to an FP&A solution, you get access to scenario planning tools that streamline the process. This means testing more scenarios and creating more contingencies that make your clients feel secure and protected.
Sharing and Collaboration
To maximize efficiency, you need seamless access for everyone who works on the client to complete their responsibilities. Something that keeps work centralized and accessible keeps workflows running smoothly.
You should also look for options that allow you to share with clients, but with limits. You want them to have visibility into the reporting when they need it, but without the ability to edit. Fortunately, unlike an Excel sheet, there’s no baked in formulas or formatting that can break with an errant click.
Client-friendly Formatting
While you may know your way around financial reporting, you can’t guarantee your clients will.
What a report is is important, but how the report is presented is arguably more important when it’s built for someone without the financial know-how. Your clients should be able to get an understanding of how their business is performing without your guidance.
This is where dashboards that track KPIs and provide effective visuals help bridge the understanding gap. They surface the most essential information and translate the numbers into something easier to understand at a glance.
Customer Support
Transitioning to a new platform can be scary. While you can go through the setup on your own, having the option of reaching out for a helping hand makes the change more approachable.
Customer support takes many different forms. Some companies opt for chat or email options while others may offer support by phone or video calls.
Check for options that offer customer support the way you want to receive it. Maybe you prefer the instant feedback of a phone call or the ability to compose your thoughts for a well-structured email. Whichever you prefer, there’s an option for you.
An FP&A Platform Without Compromise
Gain a competitive edge with the FP&A platform that helps firms accelerate revenue, improve margins, and standardize their services.
Jirav helps firms increase revenue per client and employee by leveraging integrations and automation that do the manual labor, helping you focus on the high value aspects of your services.
Request a demo to see how we can help you.