BARC Score Financial Performance Management

Markets and competition today are highly dynamic and complex, and the future is characterized by uncertainty. In this context, the management and monitoring of financial performance across an organization and therefore financial performance management (FPM) are gaining in importance for a growing number of companies.

The age of digitalization presents organizations with new challenges. As a result, the monitoring and forecasting of financial targets is becoming increasingly important as part of FPM. In recent years, many companies have painfully recognized the importance of transparency in financial processes for efficient management. This transparency not only includes looking back into the past (“what has happened”) but increasingly requires anticipation and reflection of future developments in an organization’s process goals and structures (“what will happen”).

For this reason, key focus areas that companies are pursuing right now in FPM are:

• An accelerated supply of information for decision-makers.
• Increasing consideration of internal and external data for decision-making.
• Greater use of data and analytics in decision-making and management processes.
• Short-term planning and forecasts with a higher updating frequency.
• Digitalization and greater software support for internal processes as an essential basis for their optimization and further automation.

Support from modern and requirements-oriented software solutions is an essential element in achieving these goals. Hereby, the integration of various FPM disciplines in common software platforms (e.g., financial planning and forecasting, financial consolidation and close, financial reporting and disclosure management, ad hoc query and analysis of financial data) is a means of avoiding problems and user dissatisfaction but also helps to streamline financial management processes within companies and to drive finance transformation.