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deFacto Planning | Take Your Excel-Based Business Planning to a Higher Plane

While Excel is the world’s leading business tool, using Excel for company-wide planning, budgeting, and reporting can be a burdensome and inefficient process. The good news is that businesses today can enjoy all the benefits of Excel-based business planning, as well as significant new benefits, while eliminating all the hassles and complexities.

By deploying a state-of-the-art corporate planning solution like deFacto Planning, you can transform your unwieldy Excel-based planning into a streamlined, simplified, and highly automated operation.

deFacto Planning uses native Excel that is tied to a database where data, formulas, security authorizations and business rules are stored. This design eliminates a host of Excel-based problems while improving all those operations, including:

  • No more broken links. deFacto Planning’s database becomes the link.
  • No need to apply formulas. deFacto Planning’s calculation engine incorporates all the formulas you need within its database. This includes not only formulas, but also advanced logic like foreign currency, allocations, inter-company eliminations, and more, all of which would be next to impossible to handle in Excel alone.
  • No wondering whether you have the right version of the spreadsheet. Because deFacto Planning’s database provides a centralized, up-to-the-minute single version of the truth, you will always be looking at the correct version.
  • No unauthorized viewing worries. Even if you accidentally send a spreadsheet to someone who is not authorized to see it, deFacto Planning provides cell-level data security to protect against viewing without the proper permissions.
  • No more Excel collaboration headaches. When using Excel alone, planners must send templates to all team members, receive the filled-in templates back, then consolidate them manually in Excel. This process can yield broken links and overridden formulas. With deFacto Planning, each user simply opens a template and enters their data directly, eliminating the need to transmit any templates by e-mail and consolidate them manually. Once a user’s data is entered, it is consolidated in real-time automatically.
  • No more workbook duplication drudgery. To create a new version of a budget using Excel alone, you must create an entirely new workbook with any number of tabs. With deFacto Planning, you simply run a rule to copy to a new version and you’re finished! Users can use the same template to make changes to their data in the new version or any other version or forecast.
  • No more dashboard complexity. Creating an interactive dashboard for senior management can be a daunting task. With deFacto Planning, you can use Excel’s charting capability to create a vast variety of interactive dashboards. In addition, you can use tools like Power BI directly against deFacto’s database.

New Capabilities

deFacto Planning not only eliminates the problems associated with traditional Excel-based business planning, it gives your business planners new capabilities that make their work easier, more accurate, and more effective. The result is better decision-making and profitability for your entire business.

The secret is a centralized database, business modeling, and automated processes for formulas, business rules, complex calculations, and more. Without a unified and centralized data repository, Excel-based budgeting is fragmented and error-prone.

By aggregating all relevant data and creating a multi-dimensional business model with automated formulas, planning and budgeting becomes much easier to perform, richer in analytical capabilities, and a more productive and powerful tool for decision making.

deFacto Planning’s multi-dimensional architecture provides a host of data manipulation and viewing capabilities that Excel alone cannot provide—for example, the ability to view an income statement in data dimensions that include time, company, actual vs. budget, product, department, location, and more.

With deFacto Planning, you can easily aggregate data, consolidate data, view data in any number of dimensions, drill down and through data, instantly view an audit trail, and easily share budgeting data and plans across your organization.

To learn more, download our “Take Your Excel-Based Business Planning to a Higher Plane” PDF and speak with our business planning experts and test drive deFacto Planning today!

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