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Organizations of all sizes and stages of growth need to plan!

• Small scale example
• Business Study Ex: Small Not for Profit
  A small not for profit that provides services to the elderly gets most of its funding from the county. Each year it needs to submit an annual budget to the county for all its expenses, broken out by its various programs (meals on wheels, home health visits, senior centers, etc). In addition it needs to provide a detailed by-employee budget that captures their salaries, wages (for part time workers), benefits costs and includes an allocation of these personnel expenses to the programs. This is all prepared by a single person (the CFO), using data extracted from their accounting system (ERP) and their payroll system. The budget must be submitted in a strictly specified format in Excel. The CFO will refer to this budget occasionally during the year, and do a little actual vs. budget reporting.
• Growing organization example
• Business Study Ex: Growing Physician Practice Network
  A growing physician practice network needs to start gathering input from its 40 or so specialty practices (Pediatrics, oncology, hematology, etc) in order to create a detailed plan to support better financial management. The financial planning and analysis department consists of two people (a director and a financial analyst), who need to collect, organize and aggregate plan data submitted by the 40 practice managers. The practices are all used to operating as independent entities, and have their own separate billing systems from different software vendors. The billing systems are relevant for the plan because they contain actual data about how the physicians billed in the past, that enable the managers to project how they might bill in the future. For example, performing a surgical procedure has more costs and revenue associated with it than a simple office visit. In order to plan they need to estimate detailed (by physician) revenue projections, labor costs, and operating expenses. They also need to model items like bad debt and insurance payer contracts. Once the initial plan is done, they need to report on all of this against actual data at a detailed level in order to measure and monitor performance.
• Large global company example
• Business Study Ex: Large Global Insurance Company
  A large global insurance company needs to build a flow model of its business that takes basic inputs (counts of written premium, average premium amount, policy term) by product, channel, agent, geography, currency, month and – using a set of core assumptions around new business, customer retention and currency rates, as well as actuarial ratios – calculates a plan Profit and Loss statement by any combination of the listed dimensions. The model is initially pre-populated using historical data, but then is opened up to hundreds of managers to modify for their particular geography. For example the manager for Fairfield County, CT might estimate that there will be a 20% increase in written premium due to the recruitment of several new agents, but also a 15% decrease in retention rates due to aggressive competition. All of this data needs to be collected and consolidated, and then reviewed. This process may be repeated several times with each revision being saved before the plan is finalized, representing snapshots of possible futures based on different assumptions. Subsequently the process is revisited every month to update the forecast. A large number of reports and dashboards incorporate this data along with actual data as they come in. Besides the hundreds of managers who contribute to the process, and then consume the reports to help them make informed decisions, there is a dedicated team of financial analysts who orchestrate and manage the process.
• Case Studies

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