The old school annual budgeting and planning process is just that – old school. Today’s forward-thinking FP&A executives, managers, and analysts instead are embracing continuous planning and rolling forecasting. Rolling forecasting is the process of simulating profit and loss for a company on a rolling basis. Many FP&A executives who’ve led their company’s transition from the inefficient annual budgeting process to one of continuous planning and rolling forecasting will tell you it was one of the bst decisions they’ve made for their company.

One of the biggest challenges with the traditional approach of developing an annual plan or budget is that as the year goes on, you end up making decisions based on the reality of your business from two, three, or even more quarters ago. You are not able to factor in recent changes in your business or your market. You don’t have the ability to quickly react to disruptions in the market or to new opportunities that you did not foresee months ago.

Continuous planning gives you the ability to quickly react and respond to all the unforeseen changes in your business, and to do so in a way that reflects the current reality of your business. It provides a methodology for forecasting at frequent intervals throughout the year, and enables managers to see trends, patterns and “breaks in the curve” long before your competitors. It is the singular most powerful tool to help your line-of-business managers and senior executives make better informed decisions regarding your products and your market.

Jim Collins, performance management strategy executive at IBM and Guy Jones, worldwide technical sales executive, IBM Performance Management, will be discussing continuous planning and rolling forecasting in a webinar on Thursday, June 21, 2018 at 11am ET. They’ll explain how implementing a system of continuous planning and rolling forecasts can help your organization:

• Increase the timeliness, accuracy and insightfulness of plans, budgets and forecasts
• Address emerging threats and embrace new opportunities more proactively
• Improve profitability and operating performance.

Jim and Guy will also show a demo of IBM Planning Analytics to show how multidimensional modeling is a key enabler of continuous planning, helping you update and revise your forecasts quickly and easily.

It’s time to leave the past behind and start your journey toward more efficient and effective business planning.

Learn more about continuous planning and rolling forecasting:

Beyond Budgeting: The Case for Rolling Forecasts