What is FP&A Lite and how can it improve my Unit4 Financials by Coda system?

What is FP&A lite?

FP&A Lite is a strategic add-on for customers of Unit4 Financials by Coda. This Cloud-only product will only work for you if you’re already using our financial management system, Unit4 Financials by Coda in the Cloud. 

FP&A lite provides users the power to perform self-service analysis on financial profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statements in a systemized, centralized environment, integrated directly with your financial data source. 

By placing on-demand analytics capabilities in the hands of ordinary finance team users, the solution simplifies complex data into meaningful insight to support better decision-making. 

FP&A Lite helps transform financial management systems and provides a valuable starting point on your journey to full financial planning and analytics capabilities. 

Why is FP&A Lite a valuable tool?

To answer this, it’s worth thinking about the tools and processes that finance teams generally turn to when they want to interrogate financial data. 

Imagine you have a query and want to delve into your P&L, or perhaps you want to build up a more detailed picture of your cash flow or gain a better understanding of your balance sheet position. 

In all likelihood, your workflow will involve using the Unit4 Financials by Coda Excel add-on to pull the relevant data out, enabling you to slice, dice, interrogate, and generate the answers you need. 

Very quickly, the limitations of Excel will become obvious, such as wasted time, formulaic inconsistencies, and multiple versions of the truth, given its inability to meet the demands of enterprise data, being a personal productivity accounting tool.

However, once you have multiple team members interrogating the data, adding input to spreadsheets - perhaps generating their own documents - you have inevitable issues with version control and an absence of any or adequate visibility controls within the solution. 

Excel, which relies on fragmented data to operate, cannot connect to the data that underlies other U4F functions. All of this results in a lack of trust, wasted time, and delays to decision-making.

If you’ve ever experienced this kind of process, it’ll be clear to you that finance professionals need a more effective method for generating the answers to queries related to financial data - one that’s accurate, easy to use, and easy to deploy. 

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How does FP&A Lite work?

FP&A Lite removes the need for time-consuming, error-prone manual data extraction. In its place, you get a single, centralized location for analysis and reporting, integrated directly with the original financial data source. 

Our intelligent solution allows you to access individual transactions in a single click, boosting confidence and saving time, allowing self-service analytics through dynamic visualization techniques that utilize reports and dashboards. All of which puts you back in control of information and lets you make decisions quickly and effectively.

FP&A Lite can use up to eight elements to facilitate slice-and-dice analysis within the dashboard. If you want to get granular and investigate an individual figure, simply click on the value to drill directly through to Unit4 Financials by Coda to investigate the underlying individual transactions. 

What’s more, through a range of visualizations, you can see in real-time how, for example, revenue and expenses are split, and what makes up the individual items - right down to leaf level. 

FP&A Lite enhances user experience for those working with a financial management system as you can easily drag and drop to update the visualization as needed – whether that’s to change the context of the data, pivot effortlessly, interact and investigate, or change and compare the actuals for different date ranges.   

FP&A Lite users can use the icicle chart to drill through your group structure, define and track KPIs, drill down to different elements within the income statement, analyze the P&L contribution for different periods, spot any unusual patterns occurring across the numbers, and so much more.

All system users can create their unique dashboards for greater insights into organizational financial data. These insights can be shared as a public dashboard for increased collaboration and to support the strategic interpretation of data among other teams.

FP&A Lite is designed as an essential but easily deployable enhancement to your existing Unit4 Financials by Coda Cloud stack. Best of all, FP&A Lite can be integrated into your existing Unit4 Financials by Coda Cloud setup in as little as five days.