Microsoft Excel is one of the most commonly used tools for strategic planning and users are very familiar with it, about 60% of businesses were still using Excel in recent years. Because of this, one might expect that people using it have a favorable view of Excel planning. While Excel is familiar to users, it has many downsides for planning. It requires a lot of manual processes and correction, is prone to errors, has poor or lacks at all version control, and tends to be very slow, maybe even break, when using a lot of data. In this article, we are going to address a few of them and how to minimize them by adding IBM Planning Analytics to Excel.

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Budgeting and forecasting have become an important and inevitable part of leadership tools. Budgets for the next year and forecasts of the current year should be made available to all personnel from strategic to operational levels, it should integrate the whole organization and lead management in making their decisions. However, when the company’s budgeting period starting date is approaching, such a great idea for most of the employees responsible for coordinating and creating a budget (usually controllers) turns into a nightmare.