The ability for your Company to update its strategic plan effortlessly

Some stakeholders may perceive historical and legacy 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.

There may have been divestments or acquisitions which the model may struggle to account for in detail. The model may feature external links across the workbook. You may be concerned about the repercussions of manipulating some of these worksheets, as you risk #REF! errors from these external cell links flowing through the entire strategic plan.

In essence your Company may not fully see the value in leveraging a legacy strategic plan financial model. Model stakeholders view the existing strategic plan model as clunky, having unstable external file links, and not user-friendly in terms of undertaking value-adding sensitivity/scenario or ad-hoc analysis of your Company’s strategic plan.

The added-value of a seamless, best-practice and audit-friendly strategic financial model

Once your Company implements the model, it will find the challenge of updating the strategic plan a smooth process. The strategic plan will be a consistent model, in terms of having a table of contents, logical information flow across the workbook, source external links restricted to designated import worksheets, its aesthetic appearance of fonts and heading sizes, and error/alert checks to validate cell calculations.

An answer to your Company’s strategic planning process challenges

Model users will be able to readily update the strategic plan model to reflect the new financial year. Update the forecast assumptions in the “Assumptions” worksheet, simply add a new import worksheet to flow in the latest financial numbers, and update the relevant worksheets to account for the new financial actuals. Embedded error and alert checks throughout your Company’s financial model will help to provide value-adding verification to the rollover of the strategic plan for the new financial year.