When businesses think about automating budget forecasting, the first instinct is to invest in a Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) tool \u2014 which promises seamless data aggregation and flexible forecasting. It sounds like the perfect solution.<\/p>\n
But if the main problem is not forecasting, but data not properly aggregated<\/strong>.<\/p>\n While FP&A promises to connect with ERP, HR, and accounting, the quality of forecasts depends entirely on the quality of the input data. Without real-time data from ERP, FP&A is not effective.<\/p>\n The reality is, finance departments still have to spend time collecting, cleaning, and reconciling spending data from multiple Excel files, spending applications, and internal reports \u2014 before pushing it into FP&A. Despite investing tens of thousands of dollars in software, they still repeat the same manual process every week to ensure clean data.<\/p>\n This article will help you understand the root cause of budget forecasting automation\u2014which comes from automating spending data\u2014and how to fix it to make your forecasting more accurate.<\/p>\n