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The Importance of Planning and Forecasting in BI

From PARIS Technologies

The budgeting and forecasting process for most organizations is long and tedious and occurs on an annual basis, at least. Companies try to do it more often to improve accuracy and aim to ultimately implement a procedure for continuous planning, rolling forecasts, and driver-based planning.

Unlike any other business process, budgeting and forecasting is unique because it is forward thinking. Business processes like accounting, inventory tracking, invoicing, shipping, etc. are based on actual events from the past and present.

This is a fundamental difference as it also defines how the data from these processes are managed. Essentially, actual events are captured as transactions in ERPs, supply chain systems, invoicing and accounting systems, etc., and data related to it is effectively stored in its databases. On the other hand, budgets and forecasts typically reside in spreadsheets where aggregate data is entered by several people in the organization.

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