5 benefits of Unit4 FP&A lite for integrated planning and analytics

1. Reduced reliance on legacy systems like Excel

The go-to analysis tool for many organizations is Microsoft Excel, but it relies on manual data consolidation and entry that can be time-consuming and prone to errors, which can have major consequences for decision-making and financial health. 

For existing Unit4 Financial management software users, if you want to interrogate your financial data, this tends to involve using the Excel add-in to connect to the solution, pulling the data out, and then applying Excel’s filters, pivot tables, formulas, diagrammatic representations, and other tools. 

Additionally, financial analysis needs to be a collaborative process involving multiple team members. Legacy systems aren’t not designed for multiple users working in the same application simultaneously, which can lead to issues with version history and if data is up-to-date.

FP&A Lite delivers an effective and efficient alternative - instead of manually extracting data into Excel, the solution provides a single integrated platform for analysis. FP&A Lite reports directly on actual and budget data from your Unit4 Financial management system, reducing reliance on inefficient tools like Excel. 

2. Self-service analytics for all users 

Outdated systems, especially those using spreadsheets, aren’t made for self-service analytics. This places a large amount of manual work on finance teams to create reports for other members of the organization, meaning strategic analysis is often forgotten.

Gartner defines self-service analytics as a form of business intelligence (BI) in which all users are “enabled and encouraged to perform queries and generate reports on their own, with nominal IT support.” 

Data democratization enables all members of an organization, technical or otherwise, to go and get the data they need, rather than request it. This naturally creates a data-driven culture in the organization, as teams are more likely to seek out data with less restricted access, a positive move for the entire organization. 

FP&A Lite opens the door to self-service analysis, self-explanatory dashboards give any user an instant and clear view of what’s happening across your finances. Alongside this, a choice of various dynamic, interactive visualizations supports native drill-through to allow deep insight into financial health and performance for everyone.

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3. A single source of truth for data

One of the core benefits of Unit4 FP&A Lite is its unification and visibility of data. With one unified solution, rather than multiple spreadsheets with different versions of truth, 

Moving data to other apps for analysis can erode the concept of a single source of truth. Version control issues can arise, making it difficult to determine whose version of the truth you are looking at.

By giving you a single, fully integrated platform for analysis and reporting, you can always be confident that you are dealing with trustworthy, error-free data viewed through a single lens. You can finally trust the numbers and confidently apply them to your decision-making. 

4. Support robust governance practices

Spreadsheet-based analysis and reporting lack accountability, causing headaches for those responsible for internal compliance – version history, tracking changes, and knowing who made changes, is near impossible.

Native analysis and reporting within Unit4’s software allow you can bypass all of those Excel-related headaches. In their place, you get the full benefit of Unit4’s governance frameworks controlling user data access rights (e.g., single sign-on and ‘need to know’ access restrictions). 

FP&A Lite also allows you to make a distinction between who can create new public and private dashboards, edit, or delete, existing dashboards, and more. Additionally, by enabling multiple users to access a single document simultaneously in the Cloud, changes can be tracked and there’s only one version of any document.