Although your Company may be well-organised and resourced, significant problems can consume its strategic planning process. These problems can be a result of financial modelling experience and a lack of best-practice financial modelling with the model build of the strategic plan.

Your Company might be struggling to consolidate its financial statements into one source of truth. It may be greatly impacting your ability to undertake value-adding financial analysis, strategic forecasting and financial planning.

You Company might be faced with the continuous amendments and revisions of its financial models. Often there is a need to completely re-engineer the model from scratch, which is not only time-consuming but is susceptible to material error.

Your Company might be like this; a myriad of different financial information across many systems, which makes analysing the overall financial performance very difficult. Often different business units may be using different accounting systems.

Some stakeholders may perceive historical strategic plans as redundant for the new financial year’s planning. Macro and micro factors may have changed significantly for your Company, in terms of business units or cost/revenue drivers, which the legacy strategic plan may be unable to model.

As discussed in Article 1, on the surface costing a service contract may seem straight forward; however there are a number of factors to consider. Your Company needs to understand the importance of full-costing versus incremental costing of a new service contract.