13-Week Rolling Cash Forecast Solution

1 week. 

That was the duration of time from the CFO's liquidity planning directive to his systems team and Finit's complete rollout of a 13-week, rolling cash forecasting solution within OneStream Software. In this Finit Solution Spotlight, we tell the story of how Finit, with its unmatched OneStream expertise, turned vision into reality with another successful client-tailored, innovative solution emphasizing critical data visibility, granular detail, process completeness and risk mitigation. 

 All in 1 week.

 Solution Highlights

     •. Leverage your existing OneStream application foundation
     •  Apply this weekly solution even if your application has monthly time periods
     •. Gather data in a single common form in local currency:
               ·  Provides flexibility, consistency, and simplicity for users
               ·  Allows for constant rate translation based on existing rates or independent weekly rates
     •  Build reporting quickly:
               ·  Employs OneStream's financial intelligence for signage (inflows/outflows), translation, and consolidation
               ·  Uses actual details based on monthly financials to create cash projections

Cash is King

Companies review and project cash activity many ways to gain insight into liquidity. With today's unprecedented business challenges, visibility into cash projections is of paramount importance. Internal or free cash flows, long-term cash forecasting, external cash flow statements and rolling short-term cash forecasts are some of the methods used by CFOs to gain information in order to match cash availability with upcoming cash needs.  

Our focus today is a rapid deployment of a business-critical liquidity planning solution. 

Here's our story.

How much Cash will we have?

Our client consists of 60 individual business units serving different markets spread around the globe.

While a few can do well in the current environment, most are going to struggle. Our client needs a way to quickly gather and consolidate the expected cash inflows and outflows by week looking out the next 13 weeks from each business. They need this so they can determine how much liquidity they need to generate and/or borrow and to which businesses it needs to be distributed.

And they need this now.

Overcoming Challenges

In addition to needing a rapid deployment of this solution, our client and the Finit team faced several additional challenges.

One sizable challenge is the fact that our client isn’t live on OneStream, meaning users aren’t yet fully comfortable with OneStream. Fortunately, end user training had already occurred, so the users' involvement with the liquidity planning solution consisted of filling out a common cash inflows/outflows form for their business unit. Given the simplistic design and approach, the user experience and acceptance of this solution were positive. 

Additionally, because the foundation of OneStream had been built, this solution could be absorbed into OneStream's existing framework of security, master data, and end user processes for a cohesive experience with limited modifications.

Our client came to us prepared with a blueprint of the result they needed, which helped overcome the challenge of time. Through backcasting, our client's team collaborated with Finit's team to design a process quickly that exceeded the CFO's expectations in cost, time, and ease of user adoption. 

Client-Tailored Technical Solutions

Some process and reporting challenges were solved through client-tailored technical solutions, such as:

Client Benefits

By performing this process within OneStream, there was no emailing of spreadsheets and manual offline work in order to create visibility, and no time lag between submission and reporting. One less usage of Excel!

OneStream allowed for visibility into each business unit's status, leveraged its data integrity controls, and allowed for meaningful reporting for our client's CFO organization.

And finally, our client achieved a 13-week cash forecasting process by business unit, region, and consolidated total company - translated at constant Fx rates - with cash flow details in only 1 week! 

To learn more about this cash forecasting solution and other Finit Solution Spotlights, please contact us at insights@finit.com.