How can revenue planning software benefit your organization?
What is revenue planning?
While sales planning and revenue planning are often spoken about interchangeably, they are not the same. With the help of product teams, customer success and operations sales teams are drivers of growth and revenue, but the two are very different when it comes to planning. Sales planning is a developed to achieve sales goals and help businesses assess previous growth, annual recurring revenue, and overall future financial health. It’s an ongoing process that evolves and changes to determine cash flow and profitability and to ensure the sales plan is flexible enough to align with changing market scenarios.
Revenue planning looks at the actual money that will flow into the organization so FP&A (financial planning and analysis) teams can plan their expenditure and investments for a certain period. It focuses on the entire customer journey, mapping marketing, sales, operations, and customer success teams, to improve the whole customer experience and ensure revenue continues to grow.
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What is revenue planning software?
Revenue planning or revenue management software is used to match sales with incoming payments and reduces revenue leakage. FP&A teams can then leverage these tools to recognize and allocate revenue to multiple business entities if needed. Revenue management software automates the process of using supply and demand analytics to determine the right price for goods and services to maximize revenue and profitability.
Revenue planning software allows organizations to create revenue plans that accurately predict and maximize profitability and foster growth. Revenue planning is critical for most organizations for budgeting, forecasting, and reporting, integrating costs and revenue with sales, or even for non-profit organizations to plan for membership, pledge drives, or other fundraising events.
What are the benefits of revenue planning software?
Revenue management solutions make life easier for business leaders and help them make the right financial decisions. An accurate revenue projection model allows leaders to make smarter decisions about key organizational priorities, including goal-setting, budgeting, and talent acquisition.
Let’s take a look at the main organizational benefits:
1. Automation
With so much data, complexity, and constant change, pricing and forecasting have moved beyond manual processes and can now benefit from automation. Automation brings increased productivity and more efficient working processes. Reports can be fully automated, and because automation works constantly and adjusts according to real-time data, FP&A teams and finance strategists can act more quickly to mitigate risk and seize opportunities.
2. Time saving
Revenue management systems significantly cut down on the amount of time people spend gathering and analyzing data. Automation through a software solution means that all the organization’s data is always on hand. There are various other mundane tasks that don’t require any human involvement, which will also be eliminated. When people don’t have to worry about determining forecast values or automatically checking data entries, they are free to focus on more strategic, value-adding tasks.
3. Better analytics and reporting
Revenue planning software is an analytics tool that offers a way to analyze and extract significant business insights and industry trends. It allows organizations to identify patterns within massive data. The less time spent collecting data means more time analyzing business trends that give a bigger picture of market segments and how they are performing. This then allows for better decision-making.
4. Smarter decision-making and AI
Organizations use AI to help them make faster, more accurate, and more consistent decisions. Software that enables smarter decision-making is key for optimizing processes and implementing risk management in business operations. Statistics-based data mining algorithms spot trends in all kinds of data across every information source, which boosts data-driven insights and helps organizations gain new benefits from revenue prediction models.
5. Lower costs
The cost of implementing a revenue planning or management system can be a financial burden to an organization, but studies consistently report that ROI means that overall costs are lowered over time. When organizations harness the power of forecasting data, they can increase revenue and decrease costs across their business.
Revenue management and planning software integrates with accounting software, CRM software, and ERP systems. They can track pricing details for products and services, provide features for revenue recognition and allocations, manage different types of revenue, such as recurring and transaction-based, monitor revenue per customer, contract, or project, and include best practices for revenue management optimization.
How can Unit4 transform your financial planning?
Harness the power of fully aligned teams with Unit4's intelligent FP&A software to drive success. Our solutions help you by combining automated, AI-infused financial planning and analysis, budget management, and financial forecasting with highly interactive dashboards and powerful, pre-configured models.
Our intelligent ERP and FP&A software solutions free your teams to spend more time delivering insights and creating value for the business. We help you understand the numbers more deeply and then turn that insight into action for better business results and accurate consolidation.
Our cloud FP&A software solution gives your people better, faster ways to put the numbers to work — through smarter planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, visualization, and analytics. As a result, your organization can take a flexible, integrated approach for all your organization's financial planning needs, whether planning cash flow, managing operational budgets, or forecasting sales, costs, and revenue.
Organizations can better manage their operations with industry-leading software for Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Human Capital Management (HCM).
You can check out Unit4's People Experience suite here.
