It can be hard for a fast-growing organisation to look past the short term. With so much going on, it’s no surprise that businesses can be tempted to spend more time working out how to meet an urgent customer request instead of planning ahead. But ignoring the future can come with big risks.

Many back-end financial and operational systems of businesses today aren’t designed with the scalability and flexibility needed to support sustained growth. Yet these systems are used day in and day out to drive new business.

At Quantrix, we are regularly approached by a wide range of organisations stuck in some unforgiving ruts, with cumbersome spreadsheets and emails dominating their existing processes – wasting time, money and resources.

Building for long-term success requires planning and a dose of patience. Every hour spent now preparing and planning for growth could save 20 times that investment in the future. It’s worth putting in the groundwork early, even if it means stepping outside your comfort zone.

Adopt a forecasting-first approach

In the most successful companies, forecasting is the primary driver that guides strategic decision making. As such, it is critically important that forecast models are based on reliable data, and encompass the full spectrum of likely scenarios. These models need to be integrated with the rest of the business to show the full ‘cause and effect’ of scenario changes as they ripple through an organisation.

In recent years, the rise of the “big-data” era has seen a change in how businesses analyse trends in customer data, production data, macro-economic financial data, and so on. Many companies are using all available data in their models in an attempt to identify trends and gain efficiencies. But, beware: it’s not about having all the data. It’s about having the relevant data.

The most successful companies facilitate the bi-directional flow of information between their business intelligence (looking at historic data) and forecasting (modelling the future) functions. This begins with robust basic forecasts to test assumptions. An opportunity is then identified and forecasts are refined with the aid of historical data and trends. Then an action is made to capitalise on the opportunity and, critically, the results of this action are fed back into future forecasts to further refine their accuracy and effectiveness. The level of detail needed within a forecast constantly changes and is driven only by the key drivers of the business.

All too frequently though, companies don’t begin with accurate forecasts. The effects of this have far reaching consequences. So, what’s the key to accurate forecasting?

Ask the right questions to get the right answers

So, you’ve got your data and you know the questions you need to answer. But, how can you appropriately structure your model to be flexible and scalable, yet robust? We live in a multidimensional world, with many organisations operating across multiple regions, selling a variety of products.

Businesses aren’t static, they’re evolving entities, constantly changing the products they offer and the ways in which they sell them. Your model needs to be flexible enough to adapt to these changes as they happen, with minimal effort. Failing to address this early on can often result in a huge amount of work to re-engineer a spreadsheet – giving yet more chance for errors to creep in.

To succeed in this evolving business landscape, it’s vital that organisations look to implement collaborative, multi-dimensional modelling tools to innovate financial planning and forecasting processes. When you’re spending thousands of pounds on capturing and analysing data in a growing business, it’s too costly to have a spreadsheet let you down.