Cost Controlling - Making the Right Decisions in Times of Crisis

Do you feel like you’ve been working on your corporate planning for a whole year? Do you have the feeling that control is slipping away from you more and more because you do not recognize deviations between your plans and actual costs in time? What if you could plan more frequently throughout the year? What if you could always keep an eye on your costs? You would be able to adjust your business planning to actual costs at any time and act confidently even in the face of short-term changes such as energy price increases. We’ll show you how to optimize your cost controlling and achieve shorter planning intervals.

Equipped thanks to regular cost controlling

What you would need is a monitoring system that informs you in good time so that you can correct your budget and adapt your decisions to changing conditions. A proactive cost management that takes place at short regular intervals. You would like to continuously review current trends and conditions to see if your goals can be met and how you can counteract them.

Imagine what it is like to know the financial state of your company in detail - today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. When you can depict current developments in scenarios and monitor them regularly. With cross-company cost controlling, you know your resources and can minimize business expenses.

What you can achieve with regular cost controlling:

• Overview of your expenses and cost causes
• Monitoring of costs through target/actual comparison
• Recognize expenditure overruns and initiate appropriate measures
• Regular adjustments of sales, manufacturing and production targets
• Realistic targets for purchasing & logistics
• Targeted control of budgets and increase of company profits

Why does no regular cost control take place in companies?

Most companies have hardly any possibilities to make adjustments for the next year already in the current year. Connecting the plan data and planning from the individual departments represents an immense expenditure of time.

Did you know that 81% of the surveyed participants from the German-speaking BI market only plan once a year? This is what our joint study with ICV 2019 shows, with complexity in planning being the most cited challenge for companies. If we take a look at data entry for corporate planning, we find that in 2020, about one in three users (76 percent) will enter their planning figures via Excel, a tool that is increasingly reaching its limits in VUCA times.

What will it cost you if you don’t act now?

The market changes so quickly, so do the costs. That makes it even more important to know your budget accurately. Because if you plan with too little budget, it can mean that important projects that could be completed are left undone and you spend the budget that wasn’t used up towards the end of the year on insignificant things. If you plan with too much budget, you can end up missing out on important things. It’s not just your business strategy that suffers. Regular holistic cost and budget planning also plays a significant role in employee planning.

Take a look at the currently rising energy and raw material prices. With the help of regular cost controlling, you can establish a solid plan of action. You may have the opportunity to adjust your production to the conditions or raise prices for your customers. You will know to what extent the increased energy prices are already hurting you and whether you can afford to cut back on production for a short time if you continuously monitor your budget and all cost centers.

Keep control: Tools for cost controlling

The good news is: You can perform cost controlling for the entire company several times a year. And thus take the wheel back in your hands. What you need is a secure and flexible tool that helps you automate your holistic planning.

In a cloud-based planning software, you can centrally capture all your cost centers and revenue sources, quickly identify correlations and present different planning scenarios. Automated data entry helps you avoid data errors and keep your data up to date at all times. No more tedious sending of planning models back and forth. Your entire planning is reduced to a few days. You don’t need any IT effort and can start right away in the software. Planning software is the perfect link between all departments and makes ad hoc planning across departments possible. Thanks to integrated AI-supported forecasting, you make the right decisions at all times.