AI In Finance

How Predictive Analytics Can Fuel the Future of FP&A

Written by Finance Automation News | Dec 11, 2020 3:30:00 PM

Finance professionals know that cash is the lifeblood of successful companies, and knowing where and when cash is coming into the business is of utmost importance.

However, while forecasting cash flow is imperative for high-performing finance teams, many teams are instead reviewing past metrics and performance.

In fact, one budgeting and planning luminary has said that the finance department sits at the back of the boat, looking at the wake and making observations of events that have already occurred. Instead, he says the corporate finance department needs to move to the front of the boat for success.

“Finance has got to get off the back of the boat and get up on the bridge, beside the captain, constantly looking forward, looking at change, what we try to do and what our options are. That’s where forecasting comes in, plotting a course for the future.”

Steve Player, The Player Group

The future of finance lies in automation across the corporate finance back office, including financial planning and analysis.

Forecasting Algorithms & Predictive Forecasting

To move from the wake of the boat to the helm, financial professionals can leverage forecasting algorithms to streamline cash flow forecasting, measure automated KPIs, and more.

Amazon has developed AWS Forecast, a fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts. Amazon Forecast can forecast key financial metrics such as revenue, expenses, and cash flow across multiple time periods and monetary units. Financial professionals can now use this toolkit to start building their forecasting algorithms for predictive forecasting and analytics.

At Auditoria, we are building our own algorithm to support the corporate finance back office. By applying powerful machine learning (ML) algorithms to structured and unstructured data, we can uncover hard-to-spot trends and streamline cash flow forecasting with precision accuracy.

Benefits include:

Scenario Modeling: Weekly, monthly, and quarterly intervals extending up to 24 months in the future with automated creation of data pipelines, aggregation, and ingestion of data feeds.

  1. Recovery of Time: Automated cash balance and treasury forecasting reduce the need to manually review data, delivering recommendations and predictions in minutes rather than weeks.
  2. Accelerated Decisions: Delivery of critical financial insights and statistical key performance indicators for finance leaders.

Improve Cash Flow Performance with Auditoria SmartFlow Skills

Auditoria helps elevate finance teams into the era of algorithmic analytical forecasting.

With cutting-edge predictive algorithms that offer a magnitude of improvement in forecasting accuracy compared to other industry alternatives, our SmartFlow Skills for Intelligent Planning help finance teams with cash balance forecasting and treasury forecasting. We support snapshot and simulations in the forecasting process, in addition to delivering statistical KPIs for typical derivative analytics that finance leaders depend upon for their planning objectives.

Stay tuned for more updates on our algorithm to support our SmartFlow Skills for Intelligent Planning to provide financial automation for the modern finance team.

Request a test drive of our SmartFlow Skills for Intelligent Planning today: https://info.auditoria.ai/request-test-drive