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What is integrated Financial Planning and why is it important?
Our world is becoming increasingly dynamic, shaped by global crises, political tensions, and ongoing change. In this environment, the ability to respond flexibly, transparently, and at short notice is more critical than ever. However, traditional financial planning approaches in many companies stand in the way of this agility. Planning for the balance sheet, cash flow, and profit and loss is often done in isolation, resulting in a lack of transparency, inefficient processes, and slow responsiveness to market changes.
The objectives and benefits of integrated financial planning include a comprehensive overview of the financial situation, early identification of potential funding shortfalls, and a solid decision-making foundation for investments, financing, or restructuring.
In an increasingly complex business environment, integrated financial planning is a critical factor for business success, resilience in times of crisis, and access to capital.
What are the challenges of Financial Planning in companies?
Integrated financial planning offers many advantages, but it also comes with several challenges.
One major difficulty is the complexity of ensuring consistent data integration across all planning components. A small error in one area can quickly affect the entire planning model. In many cases, companies also lack automated tools and interfaces to efficiently link their data. Another challenge is data quality and availability. Only complete, up-to-date, and accurate data can lead to realistic planning outcomes. Ensuring this is often difficult, especially when data originates from different sources (e.g., ERP systems, Excel spreadsheets) and depends on manual processes—both of which can significantly impact data quality.
Beyond the data-related aspects, time and resource demands must also be considered. Creating and maintaining an integrated financial plan is time-consuming, especially when current processes still rely heavily on manual tasks such as maintaining spreadsheets. In addition, it requires solid financial and business expertise—a challenge that should not be underestimated, particularly for small and mid-sized enterprises.
Finally, selecting the right planning tools is a crucial decision. The tools must be flexible enough to reflect the company’s specific business model while being standardized enough to ensure efficiency. The challenge lies in finding the right tool that fits both the size and complexity of the organisation.
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What are the benefits of Integrating Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, and P&L Planning?
Integrating balance sheet, cash flow, and profit & loss planning offers companies several key advantages—especially in terms of control, transparency, and risk management.
It enables a holistic view of the financial position, providing a complete and coherent picture of the company’s finances. All three perspectives are aligned and interconnected, allowing early identification of liquidity bottlenecks and proactive responses.
This integration creates a coherent, end-to-end financial planning model, which serves as a stronger decision-making foundation for management and investors. It also supports what-if scenario analysis, enabling better risk control. Furthermore, variance analyses across all planning areas make it easier to detect and correct deviations, resulting in improved controlling and performance monitoring.
In summary, the integration of balance sheet, P&L, and cash flow planning serves as a strategic management tool that brings foresight, transparency, and stability to the organization. Especially in dynamic or uncertain times, this becomes a true competitive advantage.
How does integrated Financial Planning help respond to market developments?
Integrated financial planning is a key instrument for responding quickly and effectively to market developments—whether during crises, when seizing new opportunities, or navigating shifts in the competitive landscape.
It enables early detection of market impacts, allowing companies to identify risks in time and take targeted countermeasures. With fast scenario analyses, concrete courses of action can be derived. This provides the ability to make decisions quickly, flexibly, and in a controlled manner, helping ensure financial stability and strengthening the company’s crisis response and resilience.
Integrated financial planning functions like an early warning system with an action plan. It not only shows where the company currently stands, but also what will happen if market conditions change—and what specific steps can be taken to safely navigate challenging times or proactively leverage opportunities.
How is Financial Planning transformed?
The transformation of financial planning typically follows six key milestones, described below:
Moving Away from Excel Silos
The first step is to eliminate manual, error-prone Excel spreadsheets. The goal is to implement a modern planning platform with a centralized and consistent data foundation.Integration of All Planning Areas
This involves linking profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow planning so that changes in one area immediately have a system-wide impact.Real-Time Forecasting and Scenario Analysis
Instead of relying on a rigid annual budget, companies shift to rolling forecasts that continuously adapt based on real-time actuals. In addition, multiple future scenarios can be simulated to support decision-making.Automated Data Integration
Manual data maintenance is replaced by live integration with operational systems, ensuring automated data synchronization and increased data reliability.Collaboration and Transparency
Planning is no longer a siloed task handled by Controlling alone. It becomes a collaborative process across departments, with all stakeholders working in a shared digital planning model.Self-Service and User Enablement
Business users can plan, simulate, and analyze independently—without requiring deep IT expertise. Controlling evolves from a data maintainer to a strategic business partner.
Checklist: Comparing SAP BPC, SAP Analytics Cloud & SAP Datasphere
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Seamless Planning with SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere
The combination of SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and SAP Datasphere provides a powerful platform for implementing modern, integrated financial planning—also known as Seamless Planning. These two solutions work together in a complementary way.
SAP Analytics Cloud serves as the centralized frontend for planning, analysis, and reporting. Its key planning functionalities include:
Planning and Forecasting
SAC allows modeling of P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow in an integrated data model. It supports rolling forecasts, scenario planning, and simulations, and offers functionalities for collaborative planning.Self-Service and Simulation
Business users can independently enter planning values and run simulations. Real-time simulations via natural language queries are also possible (e.g., “What happens if raw material prices increase by 10%?”).Visualisation and Reporting
Dashboards can be created in SAC for the CFO, management, and business units, combining actuals, plans, and forecasts in a single report.
SAP Datasphere acts as the central data management and integration layer, offering the following capabilities:
Data Consolidation
It connects both SAP and non-SAP systems, delivering high-quality, consistent data models to SAC in real time.Semantic Modeling
Data models are enriched with business logic, allowing business users to work with meaningful business objects rather than raw tables.
The practical implementation of integrated financial planning using SAC and Datasphere could look like this: In the first step, SAP Datasphere models consolidated data from S/4HANA, BW, or non-SAP systems into semantic views. These views are then connected to and transferred to SAC. Users then enter their planning values directly in SAC. Through the integration of financial logic (planning models and rules within SAC), these planning values automatically flow through the planning areas (P&L → Balance Sheet → Cash Flow). Dashboards display actual vs. plan values, variances, or scenarios, and the plan can be adjusted immediately. Optionally, the planning data can also be seamlessly transferred back to Datasphere.
The advantages of this combination include a reduction in manual export tasks and the elimination of time delays in planning due to real-time data access. It also establishes a single source of truth by using a unified data foundation for planning, analysis, and reporting. Another benefit is the support for collaborative planning, allowing multiple departments to work simultaneously within the same model.
In conclusion, the combination of SAC and Datasphere enables modern, integrated financial planning that is enterprise-wide, real-time, consistent, and flexible enough to adapt to changing market conditions.
SAP BPC
SAP BPC is a software solution for enterprise planning, budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation. It could be operated either on the SAP NetWeaver (BW-based) platform or the Microsoft (MS SQL Server) platform, depending on the edition. For many years, SAP BPC was the standard SAP tool for integrated financial planning, particularly in large enterprises.
However, SAP BPC is no longer being developed strategically. SAP has discontinued further development of BPC and is now focusing on SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) in combination with SAP Datasphere or S/4HANA Finance for Group Reporting. As a result, new customers are generally recommended to use SAC Planning. Nevertheless, there are still business scenarios where the use of BPC remains appropriate.
SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP)
SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP) is a cloud-based planning platform specifically designed for supply chain and sales/demand planning. It supports companies with integrated, enterprise-wide planning across the entire value chain and, when combined with financial systems, can also contribute to comprehensive integrated financial planning.
SAP IBP provides input data for financial planning and control—particularly in the form of operational drivers that can be translated into financial values. It works hand in hand with SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) to enable fully integrated business and financial planning. A typical system landscape might look as follows:
- SAP IBP: Operational planning – sales, production, supply chain
- SAP Analytics Cloud: Financial planning – revenue, costs, P&L, balance sheet, cash flow
- Datasphere: Data integration, harmonisation, governance
- S/4HANA: ERP data source for actuals, master data, cost structures
SAP IBP is not a replacement for traditional financial planning systems but a strategic component in a modern, integrated planning landscape.
In combination with SAP Analytics Cloud (for financial planning) and SAP Datasphere (for data integration), SAP IBP enables true end-to-end planning, where operational business and finance are seamlessly connected.
How can we support you?
We support companies in transforming their (financial) planning processes through clearly structured service packages tailored to their specific starting point. Before launching a transformation project, we recommend our xP&A workshop series: together, we assess the maturity of your current planning processes, identify weaknesses in tools, processes, and alignment, and engage all relevant stakeholders. With over 28 years of market experience, we have successfully delivered transformation projects across various industries—laying the foundation for future-proof, integrated planning using SAP’s xP&A tools.
Business planning - Workshop offers
Are your financial, sales and operational plannings still separated from each other, resulting in a lack of transparency and agility? In this interactive workshop, we measure the maturity level of your business planning.
Duration: 4-8 hours remote or in face-to-face sessions
Based on an initial as-is analysis, we develop a common understanding of the need for integrated business planning and show you how to build a future-proof planning strategy with xP&A.
Duration: up to 8 hours remoteDuration: 8 hours remote or in face-to- face sessions or in face-to-face sessions
In this workshop, we bring clarity to the jungle of planning tools and show you how to implement your xP&A strategy in the best possible technological way. At the end of the workshop, you will have an initial assessment of which software solution is best suited to your company.
Duration: 8 hours remote or in face-to- face sessions
We provide end-to-end support for companies migrating from SAP BPC to SAC Planning or Seamless Planning. From strategic planning and technical implementation to operational rollout, we guide our clients every step of the way. Our experts help you efficiently transition your existing planning processes to the cloud and enhance them with modern SAC functionalities such as integrated analytics, predictive planning, and machine-learning-based forecasting.
Through agile project phases, we support your business users with tailored training sessions, workshops, and change management measures—ensuring your teams can adopt the new planning and reporting tools quickly and confidently.
Conslusion
In an increasingly dynamic and crisis-prone world, integrated financial planning has become an essential management tool for companies. Unlike traditional, siloed planning approaches, it combines P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow into a consistent overall picture—enabling faster, more informed decisions and early risk detection.
Despite challenges such as data quality, system integration, and resource requirements, integrated financial planning offers significant advantages: greater transparency, improved forecasting capabilities, and increased responsiveness to market changes.
Modern technologies such as SAP Analytics Cloud, Datasphere, and SAP IBP enable seamless, collaborative, and automated planning based on real-time data—positioning companies for long-term success. The transformation toward Seamless Planning marks the next evolutionary step: connected, forward-looking, and decision-ready.
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