Occasionally, there is a new solution or innovative technology, which claims to be the new “wow”, the new “jolly joker” solution, that will solve ANY or even ALL Information Technology/Business/etc. difficulties your company is facing right now. Let’s get this straight!
Today, you are not going to read about the universal “next big thing”, but if you stick around, you’ll get to know a super practical tool that can significantly improve your current way of doing financial planning, budgeting, controlling, and forecasting.
Let’s see, what Abylon Rapid Planning is not:
- It’s not a magic tool. It’s a technology-based solution, with its own pros and cons.
- It’s not for everybody. It’s not designed for small companies. To put it simply, it’s not cost effective enough for them to implement such a solution.
- It doesn’t fit every need. If you are looking for an application with a super-fancy, website-like front-end, you will be disappointed. Our solution’s front-end is basically just an extension on top of Excel. Funny thing, but actually that’s one of its main and best features, since users don’t need to learn everything from scratch and don’t have to spend extra money on front-end – if you have Office365 (nowadays Microsoft365), You already have your front-end.
- It’s not a “real time” solution: because it shouldn’t be. If you’ve ever used Excel in safe mode, you know how annoying it is when errors pop-up constantly. With Abylon Rapid Planning – you type in your data, and if you think it’s OK, you’ll send it. That’s it. No errors, no nothing.
Before we go on, I must say I genuinely believe everyone is doing their best with what they have – so I did not mean to offend anyone (I hope I didn’t).
Understanding the problem (based on personal experience)
What exactly did we do?
The office where I worked did month-end closings using mainly Excel. Therefore, most people working there needed Excel experience and some sort of financial background. We downloaded some data, made the closing registries in Excel or in a separate program, and then all the numbers got uploaded and consolidated somehow.
I was part of the business development team, trying to automate tasks with VBA (Visual Basic Application). After a lot of effort, my colleague managed to upload the data (the entries made in Excel) into an SQL database through VBA. That was quite a result, but still not good enough. So, what was the problem you may ask?
The problems with this approach and solution were the following:
- There was only one person who had the required VBA knowledge. If he leaves or just gets sick for a longer period, they couldn’t replace him.
- VBA is deprecated by Microsoft, which means that even Microsoft won’t support it, and no further developments are supported.
- VBA is also called “shadow-IT”. In other words, any custom application developed with VBA won’t have any support from the internal IT team.
- The result was only HALF of the original project, since the solution wasn’t able to get the data, everyone needed, data was still distributed and downloaded manually, and all the transformations were also made in Excel.
Simplified financial planning, budgeting and forecasting
The only things you will need:
- Some business expertise
- Excel knowledge
- and SQL knowledge
If you have these, with Abylon Rapid Planning you will be able to build robust, exceptionally reliable, customizable solutions based on Excel templates developed by your own team.
Why do I believe this is a game changer for SSC-s? Or even most enterprises who have accounting, controlling, and planning procedures, or provide these activities for other companies, or subsidiaries?
Because I’ve seen a lot of real-life examples of these Excel-based procedures at various companies. I’m talking about downloading data manually, transforming it manually then sending the Excel files in emails approach. These “workflows” could’ve been transformed to something smooth, more automated, and more focused on providing genuine business value kind of processes. Processes which are also easy to scale, support and develop further anytime the organization or the workflow requires.
For more information on Rapid Planning check the product page following the link below or contact us to schedule on online demonstration.
Author of the post:
Zsolt Kreisz - Financial Controller in the past, now BI Developer at Abylon Consulting. Linkedin Profile
