OneStream Starter Kit Strategic Planning
Inplenion’s Starter Kit for Strategic Planning provides a ready-made platform from which to develop your company’s strategic financial plan
Strategic financial plans are developed with the objective of aligning the company’s long-term goals and assumptions and understanding the path needed to achieve those goals.
OneStream offers an excellent platform to accomplish this and to develop the strategic plan by combining two of its core strengths, Consolidations and Budgeting. Strategic plans use aspects of Consolidation systems and Budgeting systems. On the Consolidation side, the strategic plan projects full financial statements to understand the balance sheet and cash flows activities needed to support the P&L. Financial consolidations are also run. On the Budgeting side, the strategic planning generally follows the operational account and product drivers as in the budget.
Inplenion’s Strategic Planning Starter Kit is developed in OneStream and built on a “cash flow” model approach which is widely used in strategic planning. Value-driver assumptions help build the P&L and Balance Sheet. The balance sheet balances itself on cash or debt. And a cash flow statement is created from the P&L and Balance Sheet. Performance metrics and value creation calculations are also included.
Thus, OneStream as a platform combined with Inplenion’s Starter Kit logic offer a robust and structured system in which to manage your company’s strategic plan.
OneStream as a Planning Platform
OneStream’s feature set manages the time-consuming tasks often encountered during strategic planning. These include model updates, data imports, report creation, and consolidations. Combined, these features simplify the strategic planning set-up and management so focus is spent on plan development and analysis.
- Data imports – OneStream’s native data integration tool manages 1) connecting to external data sources and 2) how the data imports. Data in other areas of OneStream are easily imported as well. Bringing data in is a seamless part of the process.
- Reporting – OneStream’s BI dashboards provide an advanced environment in which to create reports and graphs for more insightful analysis. OneStream plan data can be linked to PowerPoint and Word documents to make updates to presentations and reports immediate. Use the Excel add-in for Excel based reports and ad hoc analysis.
- Drill Down – Each account can be drilled into to learn its calculation building blocks. The system results are thus quickly understood without reviewing the business rules.
- Business Consolidation Tasks – Financial consolidations, currency translations, and intercompany transaction matchings are standard features in OneStream.
- Extensible Dimensionality – Develop business-centric models around the single group chart of accounts. This powerful feature in OneStream enables individual businesses to expand the group’s account structure for their business needs. Each business can have its own account structure and model in which to develop strategic plans relative to the business.
These features together make for a significantly improved planning platform compared to traditional spreadsheet and hybrid spreadsheet/DB systems and makes for a faster planning process with more reliable and better understood results.
OSK Strategic Planning Provides Deeper Analysis into the Company Performance
- Flex the critical assumptions driving business value
Develop your business plans using high-level assumptions regarding its operational performance. Align the company’s critical assumptions regarding future sales and costs to ensure they are internally consistent, company-wide. The following shows drivers and assumptions used by an example retailer to project yearover-year volume growth and expected sales margins.
These driver-based assumptions help build the P&L and make plan updates and what-if scenario development much easier. Next, we connect the balance sheet’s projections to the P&L’s with additional drivers. The following shows Days of Sales Outstanding (DSO) assumptions used to project Accounts Receivables and Turnover assumptions used to project Inventory.
Building the plan based on assumptions and value drivers makes the business projections dynamic and results in later plan updates and scenario develop being quicker than if projections were all actual value inputs.
- How does strategy affect performance?
Strategic planning should focus on how to achieve goals and maximize long-term performance. Inplenion’s OSK Strategic Planning has ready-made performance metrics, reports, and graphs in which to analyze performance and to add insight into the developed plan.The following shows the starter kit’s Performance Metrics report providing many important business ratios explaining performance analysis.
Another report explains Economic Value Added.
These ready-made reports in the Starter Kit provide insightful analysis right away.
- What-if” Scenario Management
Modeling alternative versions of the business strategy assumptions or environment are easily done with Whatif Scenario Management. This Starter Kit tool makes seeding and managing scenarios an analyst driven activity.Analysts can manage their own scenarios to understand the impacts of different plan versions and their underlying assumptions.
Scenario variance reports are also included, explaining the impacts of new scenarios. The following graph visualizes the variances between two scenarios’ EBITDAs.
The combination of the Scenario Management tool and included reports thus makes scenario creation and analysis a more accessible activity in your strategic planning.
- Treasury Planning
While all companies have treasury plans the question is how closely those are tied to the projected operational plans and how far into the future those look. In Inplenion’s Starter Kit, treasury planning is an integral part of the overall planning. Each business’s future cash positions are aggregated to the Holding company through intercompany transactions. In the Holding company the treasury plans are developed based on the intercompany cash positions and the capital structure managed to finance the operations.At group consolidation, intercompany eliminations are performed and the result is the complete picture of the overall consolidated group. This combined view adds an important and insightful aspect to the overall strategic planning process.
OneStream and OSK Strategic Planning Delivers
Inplenion’s Strategic Planning Start Kit based on the OneStream platform delivers an advanced solution in which to develop your company’s strategic plan. With many ready-made tools and features the solution provides less set-up time so you can begin using the solution quicker and cut down develop time.