Are you experiencing any of these?:
- Forecast not catching things on time?
- Don’t have the people to reach the pedals?
- The team is great, but they want to grow some specific technical capabilities.
We’re here to help.
We develop a full forecasting process and toolset for your company and run them for you.
Thinking of hiring an FP&A employee?
Use us instead. We’ll give you more capability sooner.
You deserve to have a financial partner who you can pull their own weight on that team. Someone you can trust to put together a compelling financial story that is our roadmap to nailing financial targets. That story should be based on best possible forecasting and scenario analysis, and it needs to clearly spell out what to do to reduce costly business capacity issues that cause customer, owner, and employee frustration. You shouldn’t be doing all this excellent work only to fall short at the very last step and run out of cash or inventory when customers are trying to give you their money.
Areas of Support Services
12 to 18 months of cash flow forecasting
Stop losing sleep over cash. The “industry standard” is only 13 weeks of cash forecasting, that’s not long enough to make large changes that are needed sometimes.
Cash is what gives you options and decision-making power in your business. If you ever run out of cash, all your decisions are going to be made for you by the inability to act. Do not get stuck in that spot: have a cash forecast and scenario plans that will keep your spending decisions in your hands. Measure and track forecast vs actuals so that we can know our confidence level and set up improvement plans.
Tools:
- Monthly or weekly cash forecast
- Scenario plans
- Forecast vs actuals analysis
Get Your BHAG
(Big Hairy Audacious Goal)
What does this business look like in your dreams? Make it bigger and faster, that’s a BHAG. BetterForecasting will help you draw up the map to get to your BHAG. There are many ways to get there. Each route will require different resources and specific times that we’ll identify together.
“An idiot with a plan can beat a genius without a plan.” – Warren Buffet
This includes financializing and stress testing visionary new mid-term ventures. New ideas should be developed in context of the goals and assumptions of the long-term plan.
Tools:
- Scenario Planning
- Operating Plans
- Financialization of Strategy
Optimize Inventory
Inventory is your largest short-term operating capital expense and one of the largest costs for growth. Each new sale is an awesome win, but the win is tempered by having to cut a check for inventory to support them.
High-volume SKU inventory can see large dollar benefits from small improvements in forecast accuracy. We focus on improving capabilities around the highest operating capital dollar impact SKUs. We start by tracking accuracy and identifying statistical probability around everything. Then we optimize for the combination of inventory and safety stock between cost of inventory and cost of stock-outs.
Tools:
- Quantify cost of stock-outs
- Probabilistic forecasting
- Track and adjust for customer forecast accuracy
- Identify and track sources of uncertainty and find ways to improve
Process Improvement and Team Coaching
Sometimes you just need an outside perspective to give you new ideas. We do so much forecasting that we’ve found ways to incorporate crazy things, like rainfall and freezing temperatures. Maybe you just need someone to help work out the ideal process for combining multiple forecasts, and the monthly rolling forecast with your annual planning cadence. Whatever it is, we can probably help.