How can Your Company plan for its strategic plan?
The thorough nature of building or updating a strategic planning financial model requires a great deal of information. Although a strategic plan is a high-level overview of your Company, it is important to obtain immense detail as it will better assist you in completing the strategic plan.
Your Company will need to call upon various stakeholders to furnish information.
Some of the information that your Company will need
The information gathering process will take time. Depending on the size and nature of your Company, relevant stakeholders will need time in order to deliver certain information; some will send you revised information at a later date i.e. Treasury’s revised forecast on interest rates or the price of oil. Here is a list of information deliverables that your Company may need to consider when planning for its strategic plan:
- All cost of labour information, such as base salary, pension costs and other compulsory employment costs for an employer.
- A detailed breakdown of forecasted sales by product or service, by region and business unit.
- Credible and accurate forecasted numbers from Treasury for interest rates, foreign exchange, foreign interest rates and applicable commodity prices such as oil.
- Pertinent government subsidies or tax credits from your Company’s tax department – which your Company may qualify for.
- If applicable, all the Company’s debt tranche details
- An assets or corporations register to maintain an updated list of all assets/subsidiaries that have been bought and sold.
- Accounting and tax depreciation information for all your Company’s tangible assets.
- Dividend information covering not just your Company’s preference, but also the ordinary shareholders and whether imputation tax credits can be passed onto shareholders.
- Anticipated government policies that may impact your Company, i.e. making a carbon liability provision in the balance sheet for a future carbon tax or cap and trade system.
- Corporate tax and other applicable tax rate information
- Expected debt or capital raisings by your Company, as they will impact credit metrics or shareholder earnings per share.
The benefits of planning your strategic plan
The above list demonstrates the need for your Company to implement some planning. The above list of shopping items is by no means complete or absolute; it is a list to merely jog your strategic planning mind and help you to brainstorm your information needs.
To execute a credible and value-adding strategic plan for your Company, you need to be detailed orientated and source complete data from relevant stakeholders such as treasury, accounting and finance, human resources, legal and policy, and sales/marketing. You need to educate these various stakeholders about the importance the strategic planning process will deliver to your Company.