Expense planning and budgeting have always held classic challenges. To be effective, planning requires participation from many individuals in the business: the cost center managers, departmental heads, finance, and HR if we are including staff cost planning which is a large proportion in many businesses.

In this recorded webcast we look at a scenario inspired by a recent customer project which covers the issues outlined above using Anaplan’s cloud-based connected planning platform. The customer operates in the Lloyds insurance market where costs are incurred in multiple currency zones and are generally split between recurring costs or ad hoc. We will show how costs can be allocated to different company entities according to their different functions. There is also a big focus on staff costs, and in our demonstration we will show how individual staff and their associated costs can be modeled along with abilities to propose and approve requests for new staff.

Participants typically consider last year’s spend and profile it against the months of the forthcoming year. This then supports the production of variances as the year progresses and acts as a control against excess spend and generally works towards surfacing issues and understanding anomalous behavior.

This scenario has been tackled many times but in this digital age, we have greater ambitions and expectations. We want to be able to build up costs against supplier, project, and currency. Equally, our business will likely have a legal or ownership structure which differs from the management or economic entity basis around which we plan in the first instance. Hence we need a way of producing plans against the many business axes whilst retaining a slick intuitive process.