To be a successful player in today’s environment, one has to have a robust budgeting & forecasting system. Following are some of the key benefits from this exercise:
- Knowing your cash flow and other resources requirement.
- Planning and preparing for any contingencies.
- Setting goals and targets for key management personnel.
- Drawing up growth strategy and identifying milestones.
This is a very important function and if you are planning to raise funds (be it bank debt or PE/VC funding or IPO), you need to have a budgeting system that allows you to provide accurate forecasts to your investors and lenders.
This cannot be achieved overnight, and comes only through sound planning and undertaking serious budgeting & variance analysis internally, every month. SuperCFO assists in drawing up a detailed forecast model which starts with an open discussions with all key stakeholders. We then evaluate information currently available on hand and provide the same in comparable format to take informed decision for forecasting purposes. Thereafter we engage with the senior management team in discussing and debating on the numbers to validate all assumptions, after which we build a detailed forecast model. We then undertake a brief research about the company, your products and services, industry benchmarks and competition financials (wherever available) to build a detailed financial model, including sensitivity scenarios and ratio analysis to ratify various business statements.
A business forecast, if done accurately, equips you with the estimate numbers of income and expenditure and also gives you a glimpse into the company’s future.
Drawing up a detailed financial forecast along with sensitivity scenarios and ratio analysis helps in setting targets and establishing milestones for business performance. It also demonstrates what you need to do to achieve your goals and prepares you for any eventuality.
However, if this prediction goes wrong, it could cause severe damage to your organization. If you are not so confident in doing this activity by yourself, you can always seek our guidance.
We also undertake sensitivity analysis to evaluate the company’s funding requirements (under different scenarios). This also helps the company in drawing up a cash flow forecast and in agreeing on Collection and Payables Policy.
Our involvement doesn’t stop there. From thereon, we help the company in implementing the budgeting system and also hand-hold the company’s accounting team with generating monthly variance report for a cycle or two, until they are comfortable generating reports on their own. To simplify the process for the accounting staff we also provide exhaustive templates, with simple data input sheets, wherein they could feed their actual financials from their accounting software and generate detailed management dashboard.