If all that weren’t enough, finance is one of the most variable aspects of any organization. Revenue is rarely predictable either in amount or timing, and discretionary expenditure in particular is going to show variances between planned and actual. So how do you develop reliable financial plans? In particular, how do you confidently approve and fund a strategic portfolio of discretionary investments with so much potential variation?
The solution is to build flexibility into your plans to allow for adjustments to be made, and to aggressively manage finances to ensure that you know when to make those adjustments to always optimize the ability to deliver without compromising fiscal prudence. That sounds simple, but it can only be achieved with data that is accurate, complete and timely.
ServiceNow's strategic portfolio management (SPM) solution allows organizations to not only prioritize, approve, fund, deliver and measure outcomes for their strategic initiatives, we ensure that the critical financial elements are always understood and that leaders are able to confidently make the right decisions around those finances in the shortest possible time. Support for multiple financial baselines provides easy access to information on variances from those baselines, and provides context for the analysis of budget, actual, and forecast data.
The powerful reporting and analytics functionality allows organizations to see cost breakdowns annually, quarterly, etc. and for the entire portfolio, certain investments, or different part of the business. And each stakeholder can see financial information in a context that is relevant to them – the CFO can see the total portfolio with information on expenditure, variances, etc.; while individual product managers can see just the financial information that will ultimately impact their ability to deliver a profitable solution.
In our latest podcast on Financial Planning, we discuss how organizations can see the full picture of their business in one place – discretionary, operational and support. No longer do discretionary budgets have to be managed as separate entities, they can now be managed as what they are, a critical part of the overall financial picture of the organization.
