Strategic financial planning is the process of determining how a business financially manages its assets to achieve ROI and growth goals.
Strategic planning in finance is sometimes called strategic financial management. It falls under the purview of the FP&A team.
Before doing anything else, the planning team must create their objectives and goals. This happens through a combination of studying growth targets, analyzing past data, and building models and projections to assess realistic and reach targets.
To meet growth and ROI goals, the FP&A team creates financial plans, determines financial controls, and sets up a process for financial decision-making.
Strategic planning software helps organizations analyze their financial situation, develop actionable plans, and track progress against their goals.
It helps reach the goal of strategic management: to ensure an excellent ROI for the business and its stakeholders in the future.
The finance sector uses strategic planning software to:
Strategic planning software helps teams determine how much risk to take for certain investments and how to manage portfolios for the best return. By leveraging this technology, finance professionals can optimize their portfolios for long-term growth and maximize shareholder value.
Of course, strategic planning solutions should also help you improve your strategic planning process.
Strategic planning software offers a range of features designed to bring greater efficiency and effectiveness to financial planning and corporate management.
Strategic planning software can help organize and track team activities around specific projects. It facilitates team collaboration by providing a centralized communication and task assignment hub.
For example, project milestone tracking can help ensure tasks are completed on time and the project runs according to schedule. Other features like Gantt charts help users visualize project lifecycles and timelines.
Strategic planning software solutions offer a range of features that enable businesses to track their progress, uncover valuable insights, and communicate their results to stakeholders.
Strategy development is a crucial aspect of running a successful business. It involves creating and implementing plans to achieve specific goals and objectives. A good strategic planning solution should:
Some corporate planning software programs offer predictive analytics capabilities that help businesses understand how external factors may influence their strategies.
Businesses can forecast, budget, and plan accordingly using industry trends, economic indicators, and customer sentiment surveys.
The advantages of using strategic planning software include the following:
Strategic planning software provides users with a single source of truth, supporting quicker decision-making and easier collaboration.
Accessible, updated documentation makes it easier for teams to identify potential risks, troubleshoot issues, and determine solutions.
Strategic planning is a disciplined effort that produces fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide an organization.
FP&A analysts can use the software for predictive driver-based and multi-scenario planning to determine the company’s current standing and potential future.
Once executives determine their financial objectives and outline how the company will meet those goals, the software makes it simple to track your progress and make decisions about any necessary changes.
Advanced analytics and reporting capabilities give users a holistic view of company performance. This means that people from any department or level within the organization can look at key metrics and assess what actions must be taken to move toward the set goal.
The software presents this information in easy-to-read tables and graphs, making it easier to understand. With access to this information in real time, businesses can quickly adjust their strategies to meet changing market conditions or customer demands.
Not only does this help business owners to make better decisions, but it also helps to reduce the risk of planning errors and inefficiencies.
An improved strategic planning process makes it easier to keep business leaders happy, measure progress, and keep the team focused on business goals.
Continuous planning also becomes more straightforward, as strategic management software makes planning processes simpler and easier to follow. So the cost of creating and refining strategic plans goes down.
Likewise, you'll have more performance data to inform your strategic initiatives, such as using performance data to inform your strategy execution or improve your project portfolio management.
Some of the best software used for strategic financial planning include:
Cube is the first spreadsheet-native FP&A platform that empowers finance teams to plan faster, more nimbly, and more scalably without changing how they work.
Our cloud-based FP&A software helps finance teams work more effectively by collecting and centralizing data into a single source of truth.
This empowers teams to create plans and reports based on that trusted data in the spreadsheets they know and love.
Cube transforms FP&A with a spreadsheet-native platform that offers fast, flexible, and scalable financial analysis for continuous collaboration and insights.
Many high-growth companies (like Masterworks and Unqork) use Cube for all their FP&A needs.
For example, Cube:
Perhaps even more importantly, Cube was founded by a former CFO. The problems and use cases of FP&A have been baked into Cube since its inception.
FP&A teams already know and love spreadsheets. Cube simplifies many of the headaches of the often challenging planning process—like collecting actuals from other departments or checking and verifying that your numbers are correct—and lets teams turn their complicated budgeting process into a lean operation.
Check out all of the 5-star reviews on Capterra.
Sounds like a fit? Book your demo with Cube today. Keep scrolling to learn more.
Users get all of the benefits of a robust FP&A tool (like scenario analysis, data consolidation, multi-currency support, dynamic user controls, robust source system integrations, and custom reporting) within Excel and Google Sheets.
Cube eliminates tedious FP&A tasks so finance teams can deploy their efforts toward higher-level objectives.
Features:
➡️ See all of our features here.
Pros:
Cons:
Pricing:
Best for: Mid-size and enterprise FP&A teams looking to save time and grow. Cube also works for hyper-growth SMBs who want a solution that will scale with their organization's complexity.
Curious to see if Cube is a fit for your organization? Book your demo now.
Anaplan is a cloud-based strategic planning software that helps businesses plan and model their operations.
The platform provides various tools and features to support these functions, enabling users to create, manage, and share their plans and forecasts.
Anaplan's proprietary hyperblock technology enables businesses to build what-if scenarios.
It also provides an application platform that enables organizations to build and customize their planning applications.
The App Hub features pre-constructed apps for sales, operations, finance, human resources, and others and a custom app module.
Features & Benefits
Anaplan Pricing
According to various sources, plans range from $30,000–$50,000 or higher depending on the scope and scale of the project.
Anaplan vs. Cube
It's no secret that Anaplan is one of the biggest names in the FP&A industry.
But for most companies, what Anaplan offers is overkill. And overpriced.
If you're at a massive enterprise company, Anaplan can certainly fill your needs. But the implementation timeline is long and user adoption tends to be low. Plus, it's an additional roadblock for new hires, who had to learn the system.
That's why we built Cube to be easy to learn and modular, so anybody who knows how to use Excel can immediately unlock massive time savings with Cube.
Workday Adaptive Planning is a strategic planning software that provides modeling, analytics, and cloud applications for businesses and organizations of all sizes.
Workday Adaptive Planning is designed to be similar to Excel, and the core function includes budgeting, forecasting, reporting, dashboards, and financial modeling.
Workday Adaptive Planning comes with a network of global value-added resellers (VARs) that offer training and support services for each transaction.
Features & Benefits
Workday Adaptive Planning Pricing
Workday Adaptive Planning does not provide pricing information on its website, but various sources estimate that pricing starts at $15,000 depending on the organization's size.
Read our comparison of Anaplan vs Adaptive vs Planful vs Vena vs Datarails vs Cube.
NetSuite is an integrated cloud-based business management software that offers various features spanning ERP, financials, commerce, inventory management, HR, PSA, supply chain management, and CRM.
NetSuite provides businesses with automation and real-time operational and financial performance analysis.
NetSuite's strategic planning module helps businesses create models of long-term strategies that include financial assumptions, cash flow analysis, and resource allocations.
The software allows users to set up scenarios for testing different strategies before executing them. It enables companies to benchmark performance and compares results against competitors.
Features & Benefits
NetSuite Pricing
NetSuite does not provide pricing information on its website. However, customer reviews estimate that a NetSuite license includes a $999/month licensing fee and an additional $99/month for each user.
Read our NetSuite vs Quickbooks comparison.
Did you know?
NetSuite and Cube work together. You can use NetSuite as your ERP solution and connect your data, through Cube, into Excel or Google Sheets, where you can do much of your strategic planning.
The Google Sheets integration is key here, as it makes your strategic planning and progress tracking collaborative and shareable. Everybody can always have access to the most recent data AND you can work in a highly cooperative environment. It's a win-win.
Jedox is a planning and performance management platform for finance, sales, and operations. Jedox uses artificial intelligence to offer integrated business planning.
Jedox enables users to create financial models, budgeting solutions, and forecasting models. It was designed to help organizations assess performance and make decisions on how to optimize operations.
Features & Benefits
Jedox Pricing
Jedox does not provide pricing information on its website, but sources estimate that plans start at $160/month.
Planful, formerly Host Analytics, is one of the market's best-established FP&A platforms. Planful, as the name suggests, specializes in helping you plan better, whether in strategy, budgeting, or forecasting.
So for strategic financial planning, Planful has a lot to offer.
Key features
Pros
Cons
Pricing
Planful doesn't list its prices online.
Planful vs. Cube
While both Planful and Cube are complete planning platforms for FP&A teams, Cube keeps you in your favored spreadsheet environment and unlocks the flexibility of Google Sheets for easier financial report distribution.
Planful's Excel integration isn't as robust as Cube's.
Board is a strategic planning software with predictive analytics, comprehensive financial modeling, and advanced simulation capabilities.
The platform provides users with an intuitive user interface and workflow, enabling them to define goals, set objectives, analyze data, track progress, and make necessary changes.
Board uses advanced machine learning algorithms to help companies forecast future outcomes based on past performance and current trends.
Features & Benefits
Board Pricing
The Board pricing structure is not listed because it’s based on the size of the business, the number of user licenses, and whether any customization is needed.
However, sources report that Board is less expensive than the industry average.
OneStream is a CPM 2.0 solution that offers financial consolidation, planning, reporting, analytics, and financial data quality services to medium and large-sized companies.
OneStream is used to streamline financial processes, replace outdated legacy applications, and decrease the overall cost of ownership for financial systems. It allows teams to spend less time dealing with data integration and system maintenance.
Features & Benefits
OneStream Pricing
OneStream does not provide pricing information on its website but sources estimate that its starting price is $150,000.
Cascade is a cloud-based strategic planning software solution to help businesses develop long-term growth plans. It focuses on critical areas of the planning process, such as goal setting, budgeting, monitoring progress, and managing resources.
Cascade also includes features for collaboration, analytics, reporting, and visualizing data.
Cascade is designed to be used by team members of any level and can integrate with other corporate systems.
The software's analytic capabilities enable businesses to review past performance and adjust future action plans accordingly.
Features & Benefits
Cascade Pricing
Jirav is a driver-based planning platform. For FP&A teams that prefer a driver-based model, Jirav might be a good solution.
Features
Pros
Cons
Pricing
Jirav has three pricing tiers:
Sage Intacct is a cloud-based financial management and accounting software for small to midsize organizations. It helps businesses automate critical financial processes and gain insights into their operational performance.
It's tailored to accommodate the needs of each accountancy firm and comes with a comprehensive suite of functionality that will streamline core financials.
Sage Intacct provides core accounting applications like the general ledger, accounts payable and receivable, cash management, and order management.
It supports functionality for built-in dashboards, real-time reporting, time and expense management, project accounting, revenue management, and global consolidations for multiple entities.
Features & Benefits
Sage Intacct Pricing
We were unable to find Sage Intacct's pricing on its website, but sources estimate that prices range between $15,000-$60,000, depending on your individual or organization's needs.
Determining the ideal software for your organization involves several critical steps. Here, we offer a clear and comprehensive framework, aimed at guiding you through a thorough and informed decision-making process.
Assess Integration and Compatibility
Verify the software's ability to seamlessly integrate with existing systems (like ERP or CRM) and its compatibility with your technological infrastructure to avoid future integration issues.
Involve Key Stakeholders
Effectively involve key stakeholders by conducting collaborative meetings and surveys to ensure the chosen software meets diverse departmental needs and aligns with company goals.
Analyze Cost vs. Benefit
Perform a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the software's ROI, considering both direct costs and indirect benefits such as efficiency improvements and potential revenue growth.
Evaluate Software Features
Focus on critical features such as data analytics, real-time reporting, and user interface. Ensure the software can handle your specific financial planning needs and data volume.
Make the Final Choice
Balance stakeholder feedback and cost-benefit analysis against strategic objectives, focusing on software functionality, integration capabilities, scalability, vendor reputation, and support.
Looking for a strategic planning software that blends efficiency with simplicity? Designed for fast implementation and user-friendliness, Cube stands out as the perfect choice.
Cube, an all-in-one FP&A software, streamlines your project planning and execution with its advanced analytics and reporting capabilities.
It makes reporting and KPI management more straightforward, enhances the accuracy of forecasting and budgeting, and accelerates closing and consolidation cycles, leading to increased control and fewer errors.
Book your free demo to see the strategic planning capabilities of Cube for yourself.