The Art and Science of Financial Forecast Reliability: Start Here
Summary
• Regularly review and update the data used as the financial situation changes frequently and can have a significant impact on performance over time. Combining multiple forecast methods depending on the assumptions used leads to a more complete and accurate picture of the businesses’ financial situation. If your financial forecast requires input from many constituents throughout an organization, instead of emailing spreadsheet templates back and forth, the use of one of these systems will help mitigate the possibility of human error in consolidation. People that built the financial forecast should be able to effectively explain it to someone else familiar with the business who can then independently look at the proverbial forest instead of the trees. This adds an additional step and a delay in an already tight deadline environment, but I have found it critical to catching errors or anomalies that were previously going unnoticed.
