Having an accurate and dynamic forecast creates a confident finance function in any business. However, when your skilled FP&A team members spend hours gathering and formatting static spreadsheets, that’s less time being spent on analyzing results, developing what-if scenarios, and modeling strategic plans and forecasts. That's where NetSuite FP&A solutions come in; accomplish more, faster, with the right NetSuite financial planning software.
Even organizations with powerful cloud ERP platforms like Oracle NetSuite often find that, without automation and integration on the front end of their finance and accounting processes, their budgeting, forecasting, and reporting remain labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly. Business Budgeting software eliminates these issues.
So how can Oracle NetSuite customers automate FP&A and take advantage of budgeting forecasting software? By evaluating Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) platforms that integrate with their source systems.
It’s no secret that many Excel users refer to working in manual spreadsheets as “Excel Hell”. This is because teams who rely on Excel to manually budget, forecast, and report have outgrown them due to the larger sets of data, systems, and people involved in the process. Here are some key issues that come with outgrowing spreadsheets:
Just as businesses outgrow their initial accounting systems like QuickBooks Online (QBO) or Xero to embrace the power of NetSuite, a similar evolution is happening with spreadsheets. If you find yourself on or transitioning to NetSuite, chances are your Excel processes are struggling to keep up with the increasing volume of data.
If you're already on NetSuite, chances are your reliance on Excel processes is hindering rather than aiding your progress.
The sheer volume of data, coupled with the need for quicker and more comprehensive information and reports, demands a more sophisticated solution. This is when Cloud FP&A software is not just a necessity but a catalyst for businesses on NetSuite looking to stay agile, informed, and ready for the next phase of growth.
In short, for growth-driven CFOs and their finance teams, FP&A can't be done on NetSuite and spreadsheets alone.
Choosing the right cloud FP&A software is a critical decision for any business. To make the selection process smoother, here are 7 features you should prioritize. These features are designed to cater to your financial planning and analysis requirements, ensuring effective management of your resources and financial performance.
Empower your finance team with the capability to model data with reporting hierarchies, rollups, and business drivers that provide instant insights to better navigate your business.
Take your analysis to the next level with powerful reporting features designed for management, finance teams, department managers, and business users.
A user-friendly interface combined with efficient administration features ensures a smooth experience from implementation to daily use, promoting widespread adoption.
Embrace automation to streamline financial planning and analysis processes, allowing your team to focus on strategic decision-making rather than mundane tasks that negatively impact productivity and morale.
Rapid deployment is crucial for minimizing downtime and ensuring your team can leverage the software's benefits immediately.
Prioritize reliable customer support to promptly address any queries or issues, ensuring a positive user experience and continued success with the software.
Before we dive down into the differences between these three systems, let’s first look at the reasons behind using an FP&A platform with Oracle NetSuite.
We’ve listed our top three NetSuite forecasting and budgeting tools, outlined the product, and compared them side-by-side in terms of overall features, learning curve, and pricing.
Limelight is an all-in-one financial planning, forecasting, and reporting web-based workspace. It directly integrates with Oracle NetSuite as well as other systems such as HR, Payroll, and CRM to centralize data. It offers a modern, user-friendly interface that is easily managed by business users and is accessible from anywhere and on any device. Limelight brings the best of Excel and the web together and automatically consolidates financial and operational data for immediate analysis so teams can collaborate across departments in real time.
Limelight offers an Excel look and feel as well as full support for Excel formulas within a simple, user-friendly modern interface. This makes it easy for users to leverage their Excel skills to learn, navigate and create their own self-service budgeting, forecasting, and reporting templates. Finance and accounting teams can quickly build reports, forecasts, and budgets using data directly sourced from their ERP.
Limelight was developed by finance professionals as a comprehensive solution for budgeting, planning, forecasting, headcount planning, workflows, reporting, and automation. Every feature of Limelight provides a more unified, collaborative, and streamlined experience for your organization.
Limelight is competitively priced and offers implementation packages that provide customers with their exact budget upfront, allowing them to be up and running on the platform faster. Implementation is completed by our own team and not a third party, meaning Limelight is with the customer throughout their entire journey.
Formerly Adaptive Insights, Workday Adaptive Planning is a cloud FP&A platform that offers unified planning, reporting, and analysis for Finance teams. Beyond Finance, it provides a tailored solution for Sales, Workforce Planning and Operational Planning, as separate modules in the same workspace.
Workday Adaptive Planning requires a steep learning curve for users, in large part because it is a web-based solution with its scripting language. Since the platform and its functionality are a departure from Excel, users must dedicate a lot of time to fully learn how the tool works and apply this knowledge to build financial templates, reports, and dashboards.
Workday Adaptive Planning offers competitive licensing costs. Most implementations are delivered by third-party partners which can sometimes make deployments more costly. However, Adaptive Planning's large community of partners provides customers with access to a larger pool of resources to leverage and use.
Oracle PBCS is a planning, budgeting, and forecasting solution enabling organizations to adopt better planning practices and improve forecasting accuracy without the need for heavy IT resources. Oracle PBCS allows users to customize reports to suit business requirements.
Oracle PBCS's layout and UI are not the most intuitive. Getting accustomed to the tool takes longer and requires more enablement. The system requires lots of clicks and has separate modules that need to be purchased and additionally learned. Once streamlined and trained, companies will experience the benefits.
With Oracle Smart View, users can access and report on their Oracle EPM and BI tools, as well as access data in real time. However, Smart View does not offer the same capabilities across other source systems.
Oracle PBCS is one of the more expensive FP&A platforms in the market. While you can take advantage of timely promotions and heavy discounts, overall, this is a platform that requires a deeper investment over a long period of time. Oracle has a large community of partners that provide exceptional implementation and support services for PBCS.
When searching for the NetSuite budgeting and forecasting tool for Oracle NetSuite, users should perform in-depth research into each vendor. As an FP&A vendor ourselves, we understand the needs of our prospects through the experience we have with our customers. We know what it takes for you to maximize the value out of your Oracle NetSuite FP&A activities.
For help evaluating a solution that works best for your needs, check out our Cloud FP&A Checklist.