Are you interested in what influences your company's market position? Do you want to find primary but also secondary possible causes? Do you need both aggregate and detailed sales information to uncover patterns in customer behaviour? Or do you need a report that is not part of the operational system reporting and IT is fully loaded?

Misalignment between a company's strategy and its operational activities is now a key problem for many companies, as there is often a disconnect between the visions of owners and directors and the routine operational objectives that are carried out at lower levels of management. One reason for this is that the strategic visions are not well linked to the sub-objectives and the impact of the sub-objectives on achieving the strategic visions is poorly measured.

Modern tools offer a sophisticated application framework for setting objectives at different management levels and cascading them together.The graphical interface is very intuitive and very efficient to work with. But beyond this, the tools mainly contain sets of ready-made indicators for different sectors and support different methodologies for their application (e.g. balance scorecarding).

Although the processes of planning, creating budgets and reviewing them against reality are vital for all businesses, the most common technology tool is MS Excel. How is it possible that specialised software tools are not used in this area as in other areas? Is using Excel the best option? Are there any other and better tools?

The use of Excel for planning is certainly not the most advantageous, and other specialised tools exist, but their benefits are probably not sufficiently known. Let's take a look at some of the challenges of using MS Excel for financial planning processes and how using a dedicated tool will solve these challenges.