选择战略性财务规划工具的五个标准

Thirty years ago when I did my MBA, management was still aspiring to be a science and long-range planning was a core part of the curriculum. We were crammed with a host of numerical techniques based on time-series analysis and regression analysis for forecasting the future – a bit like the rage for predictive analytics today. It was all very seductive, but I’ve never used any of it. The real world never worked like that even back then – and it certainly doesn’t today.

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Planning horizons shrank from 10 years to five or less, corporate planning teams were disbanded, and companies focused more on the annual budget, which they knew and understood. Not looking sufficiently far ahead certainly caused some household names to go into meltdown. More often than not their fundamental error was to ignore emerging technologies that subsequently resulted in seismic shifts of consumer needs that rendered their corporate capabilities obsolete. I can think of Kodak and Polaroid just in imaging, but my guess is that every company has instances where they spectacularly misread the future. They just aren’t as public as they were well diversified or had ample cash reserves to absorb the hiccup. After all, no one is infallible all of the time.

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Strategic planning today

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Today, the emphasis for longer-term strategic planning software has switched from prediction to scenario analysis as companies recognize that it is the discontinuities, rather than trends, that largely determine the future of their organizations. In my experience, finance folk sometimes fail to appreciate this and approach strategic planning as simply an extension of the budgeting process. That is certainly not the case. Forecasting what external markets are going to look like in 5 or 10 years, and what capabilities and technologies will be needed to satisfy them, involves lots of assumptions. There are greater risks to be quantified and uncertainties to be addressed, and in the absence of hard data, judgement calls are often the only alternative.

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That means finance needs to work with corporate leaders and senior executives to identify and understand the full financial impact of the strategic choices that confront them in developing their business, making increasing use of assumptions about such things as market sizes, market shares, average selling prices, input costs, and the possible impact of alternative technologies as one gets further into the future. The fact that many of the numbers in a strategic plan are speculative can lead finance folk to treat the exercise more lightly than they do the annual budget. But get a strategic plan directionally wrong – i.e. misaligned with the way markets unfold – and there is more at stake than a couple of quarters’ results.

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The criteria by which key stakeholders will be assessing the strategy include the following:

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• Whether the strategy results in sustainable differential advantages that deliver market shares capable of generating adequate profit margins and returns on investment.
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• How much free cash the existing businesses are generating to fund planned growth; whether addition sources of capital are required over time; and how such funding choices impact the P&L account and balance sheet over the period of the plan.
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• Whether the net after-tax contribution can be improved by taking advantage of geographic inconsistencies in tax regulations.
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• Which parts of the strategy make a positive bottom-line contribution on a risk-adjusted basis and which fail to reach the company’s value-added goals.
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• Whether the company has the appetite, ability and financial reserves to live with any uncontrollable risks inherent in the strategy.
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Typically, the strategic plan will be global, involving multiple divisions and subsidiaries, various production locations, numerous currencies and tax regimes, and cover the entire gamut of business strategies from organic growth, through acquisition, and disposal. This results in a large amount of data to manipulate and analyse so it is important to choose the right tool for the task.

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Five criteria in choosing a solution for strategic financial planning

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Today there are essentially two options when carrying out long range financial planning. Either use spreadsheets, which involve a huge amount of time and effort building sophisticated financial logic from scratch, are error prone, and not at all conducive to collaboration. Or use a packaged application where the functionality is inflexible, and typically focused on the built-in financial reporting and analytics rather than the modelling of revenue streams. So what would be my criteria for selecting a tool for strategic financial planning today?

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1. Owning a solution that can be self-managed by finance users so they can build and maintain models themselves. They should be enabled to manage the complex and overlapping relationships between the changing business entities over time themselves, and quickly update key variables such as cost of capital, depreciation methods, taxation rates, exchange rates, etc.
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2. Being able to quickly integrate data from other parts of the business, to see the recent history of the key drivers that underpin the longer-term strategic planning model, e.g. average selling prices, free cash flow, etc.
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3. Making sure that the solution makes creating and testing new scenarios and different assumptions quick and easy – measured in minutes rather than hours.
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4. Being able to easily share information across a community of senior executives who are typically not everyday consumers of enterprise software.
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5. And last but not least, being able to get up and running without having to install software.
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As strategic financial planning typically involves only a small community of users, I would run straight for a subscription-based service from a cloud vendor. But would you make the same choice? Let me know your point of view in the comments.

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30年前，当我攻读MBA时，管理学仍被视为一门科学，长期规划是课程的核心部分。我们塞满了大量基于时间序列分析和回归分析的数字技术来预测未来——有点像今天预测分析的热潮。这些都很诱人，但我从来没用过。即使在当时，现实世界也从来没有这样运作过——今天当然也不是。

规划期限从10年缩短到5年或更短，企业规划团队解散，公司更多地关注年度预算，这是他们知道和理解的。展望不够长远肯定会导致一些家喻户晓的公司破产。他们的根本错误往往是忽视了新兴技术，这些技术随后导致消费者需求的巨大变化，使他们的企业能力过时。我能想到柯达(Kodak)和宝丽来(Polaroid)，但我猜每家公司都有严重误读未来的例子。它们只是没有上市，因为它们的多元化程度很高，或者有充足的现金储备来消化这一问题。毕竟，没有人在任何时候都是绝对正确的。

今天的战略规划

今天，强调的是长期战略规划软件已经从预测转向情景分析，因为公司认识到，在很大程度上决定组织未来的是不连续性，而不是趋势。根据我的经验，财务人员有时没有意识到这一点，并将战略规划简单地视为预算编制过程的延伸。这当然不是事实。预测5年或10年后外部市场会是什么样子，以及需要什么样的能力和技术来满足这些需求，涉及到很多假设。有更大的风险需要量化，有更大的不确定性需要解决，在缺乏确凿数据的情况下，判断往往是唯一的选择。

这意味着，财务部门需要与企业领导人和高管合作，识别和理解企业在发展业务过程中所面临的战略选择的全面财务影响，并越来越多地利用市场规模、市场份额、平均销售价格、投入成本以及未来替代技术可能产生的影响等假设。战略计划中的许多数字都是推测性的，这一事实可能会导致财务人员对这一工作的态度比对年度预算的态度更轻。但如果战略计划的方向性出现错误——即与市场发展的方式不一致——那么风险就不仅仅是几个季度的业绩了。

主要利益相关者评估战略的标准包括:

• 该战略是否产生可持续的差异化优势，从而提供能够产生足够利润空间和投资回报的市场份额。
• 现有业务将产生多少自由现金，为计划增长提供资金;随着时间的推移，是否需要额外的资金来源;以及这些资金选择如何在计划期间影响损益账户和资产负债表。
• 是否可以利用税收法规的地域不一致性来提高税后净贡献。
• 战略的哪些部分在风险调整的基础上做出了积极的底线贡献，哪些部分未能达到公司的增值目标。
• 公司是否有意愿、能力和资金储备来应对战略中固有的不可控风险。

通常，战略计划将是全球性的，涉及多个部门和子公司、不同的生产地点、多种货币和税收制度，并涵盖从有机增长到收购和处置的整个业务战略范围。这将导致大量的数据需要操作和分析，因此为任务选择合适的工具非常重要。

选择战略财务规划解决方案的五个标准

今天，在进行远程交易时，基本上有两种选择财务规划．要么使用电子表格，这需要花费大量的时间和精力从零开始构建复杂的财务逻辑，容易出错，而且根本不利于协作。或者使用功能不灵活的打包应用程序，并且通常侧重于内置的财务报告和分析，而不是收入流的建模。那么，我今天选择战略财务规划工具的标准是什么呢?

1. 拥有一个可以由财务用户自我管理的解决方案，这样他们就可以自己构建和维护模型。他们应该能够管理随时间变化的业务实体之间复杂和重叠的关系，并快速更新关键变量，如资本成本、折旧方法、税率、汇率等。
2. 能够快速整合来自业务其他部分的数据，以查看支撑长期战略规划模型的关键驱动因素的近期历史，例如平均销售价格，免费现金流等。
3. 确保解决方案能够快速、轻松地创建和测试新的场景和不同的假设——以分钟而不是小时来衡量。
4. 能够轻松地在高级管理人员社区之间共享信息，这些人通常不是企业软件的日常消费者。
5. 最后但并非最不重要的是，无需安装软件就可以启动和运行。

由于战略财务规划通常只涉及一小部分用户，所以我会直接从云供应商那里获得基于订阅的服务。但你会做出同样的选择吗?请在评论中告诉我你的观点。