These days, a forecast isn’t just a nice to have—it’s the difference between winning and losing for businesses. Our mission at Spotlight is to help every accounting firm and business use forecasts to power their growth. And over the past three years, we’ve been able to do exactly that with our popular three-way cash flow tool: Spotlight Forecasting.
But there was a gap...
For businesses with multiple entities, building a consolidated forecast quickly became a daunting task. The options were scarce, with most spending days pulling together spreadsheets that required a tonne of manual manipulation. So, at the beginning of 2020 we made a commitment to build a solution that lets you deliver powerful consolidated forecasts that your stakeholders expect.
Today, we’re super pumped to be launching Consolidated Forecasting to help remove those forecasting roadblocks, unlock new advisory opportunities, and give you the power to make confident decisions across multiple entities.
“This is one of the most significant updates we’ve made to our products. You now have the tools and flexibility you need to provide powerful consolidated forecasts. This is the genuine evolution of forecasting in the cloud.”
- Richard Francis, Spotlight Reporting CEO and CA
Heavy-duty consolidated forecasts built from the ground up
Consolidated Forecasts combine what you already love about Spotlight Forecasting—flexible features, dedicated support, and continuous updates—with the new-found power to feed your forecasts or scenarios into a consolidated forecast to get a full group-wide picture.
“It’s great to be able to start from the ground up, understand how each individual forecast works, and then feed these into the Consolidated Forecast.”
- Matt Serpell, CFO, Hemingway’s Brewery
It starts from the ground up. Build and customise your individual forecasts or scenarios using our massive range of features including Drivers, Dynamic Rules, and Loan Amortisation. Once you’re satisfied with the individual forecasts or scenarios, create your consolidated group, and select the forecasts or scenarios you’d like to add to your group. Simple.
What does this mean for you?
This launch represents big advances in three broad areas. Let’s dive in and explore:
1. Give your stakeholders the full group-wide picture
We built Consolidated Forecasting with feedback from a range of innovative accounting firms and CFOs. Our early access customers have been hugely enthusiastic about the benefits they’ve already seen. As Matt Serpell, CFO at Hemingway’s Brewery, puts it: “Consolidated Forecasting is extremely important to us. We need to make decisions as a whole group. Now, being able to see every single line item from across the group that impacts cash flow will give all of our stakeholders a much better picture of our group-level performance.”
2. Multi-currency consolidation for up to 75 entities
As a business scales, so do their consolidation and forecasting requirements. Supporting customers across borders brings additional complexity (and not just those late night Zoom meetings!).
We’ve built consolidated forecasts so that they’re powerful enough to handle businesses with multi-currency, yet flexible enough to scale with you as you grow. As entities and currencies are added they can be easily folded into your Consolidated Forecast.
“We’ve experienced challenges firsthand as we enter new markets and add new currencies to the mix. We’re excited to use Consolidated Forecasting here at Spotlight and take our own forecasting process to the next level.”
- Julie Francis, Spotlight Reporting CFO and Forecasting Product Owner
3. Unlock new advisory opportunities
With the addition of Consolidated Forecasting, we’ve unlocked a brand new advisory opportunity to help you expand your reach and service offering across your client base. The deeper your service offering, the more involved you can be in helping your clients grow their business and therefore create a deeper partnership.
Avril Hillind, Director at Laurenson Chartered Accountants and early access customer had this to say: “If clients can see what their consolidated position looks like, it’ll certainly help with planning and making decisions around structure. This can often have a different look and feel to just looking at the individual forecasts.”
Ready, set... consolidate!
Now it’s easy to build powerful, flexible consolidated forecasts, and with the full strength of the Spotlight Forecasting tool, you can create them quickly and accurately. We know Consolidated Forecasts will be a huge step forward for so many CFOs and Accountants.
See for yourself what it’s like to build a consolidated forecast:
- Already use Spotlight Forecasting? Jump in and select the “Add Group” button.
- If you’re a newbie to Spotlight Forecasting, sign up to one of our Power Hour webinars, start a free trial, request a demo, or read our Guide to Getting Started and learn how to build the ultimate forecast that you can then feed into your consolidated forecast.
Not quite crystal clear? Take a look at our Help Centre articles for more detailed steps.
Also, be sure to watch this webinar recording to learn more about our powerful Consolidated Forecasting tool:
What’s next?
We’re not stopping here. We’re committed to democratising cash flow forecasting. We’ll continue to listen to your feedback, constantly improving our forecasting tool and building new features along the way. We’re currently adding Intercompany Eliminations to Consolidated Forecasting (early 2021 launch). Watch this space.
We'd love to hear your thoughts about Consolidated Forecasting. Email customer@spotilghtreporting.com to share your ideas and feedback.
Happy forecasting!
