- Roadmap Planner 1 7 – Strategic Planner Product Ideas Accounting Process
- Roadmap Planner 1 7 – Strategic Planner Product Ideas Accounting Tools
- Roadmap Planner 1 7 – Strategic Planner Product Ideas Accounting System
We are entering the Age of Automation—one of the greatest technology shifts of all time. As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning become mainstream, they are beginning to affect virtually every area of our daily lives, including our jobs. These technologies enable data science, automate insights, and eliminate manual tasks, freeing finance leaders and teams to focus on improving and growing their businesses.
The changes mean finance and accounting professionals need to have new skills to understand how machine learning and other advanced technologies impact business performance, compliance, and strategy. Together we see this as the emergence of the T-shaped Professional with broad, boundary crossing competencies across the top of the ‘T' along with the deep technical skills of accounting, auditing, tax, consulting augmented with deeper technology and data analytics skills in the vertical part of the 'T'.
Roadmap Planner 1 7 – Strategic Planner Product Ideas Accounting Process
Product Launch Plan. Launching a new product can be extremely complex, with a wide range of interrelated tasks, project interdependencies, and many moving parts. A product launch plan can be invaluable in helping a marketing manager or product manager maintain a strategic overview of all launch efforts. These timeline-focused roadmaps help keep. Business valuation provides an in-depth understanding of how a firm comes up with concepts or ideas and uses invested capital to increase returns. We know the process of value creation, which we always incorporate in valuation analysis in business restructuring, strategic planning, tax, financial reporting, litigation, dispute resolution, M&A. But an effective roadmap will also serve as a project management tool in two main ways: 1) it is a strategic tool where you can make forward-looking objectives and rough timelines for your product, and 2) it can improve communication by providing a place where multiple stakeholders can weigh in on product goals and progress.
At the Maryland Association of CPAs and the Business Learning Institute, we have been gathering research from leading experts and bestselling authors, including the Institute for the Future, World Economic Forum, CPA Horizons 2025, The Second Machine Age, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, as well as empirical evidence from thousands of certified public accountants (CPAs) and finance and accounting professionals. Using this data, we have identified seven skills finance professionals will need to master to successfully navigate this new era.
Here is our Competency Model to Keep you Future Ready in an age of COVID-19
Skill No. 1: Communication
Communication is often called a 'soft skill,' a label that understates its importance. Top-down communication structures are no longer effective, if they ever really were. As a finance professional, you need to master the ability to ask questions, listen objectively to various viewpoints, consider the information at your disposal, and respond appropriately to various stakeholders across multiple communication channels. Fostering ongoing dialogue with your constituents also is essential to getting the best information possible to solve problems and identify opportunities.
Skill No. 2: Leadership
Closely tied to communication is the ability to lead. As the rate of technological transformation accelerates, your clients, colleagues, and employees may feel unable to keep up. They may worry about how new technology will affect their businesses and jobs. These feelings and concerns may make communication more emotional and challenging than typical workplace exchanges.
Understanding the needs of those around you will require a combination of emotional intelligence, empathy, cross-cultural intelligence, and insight. At various times, finance professionals must be reassuring voices, visionary adopters, motivating mentors, and shrewd negotiators. Those who hold these leadership skills may find greater success in helping their teams navigate this fast-paced era of change.
Skill No. 3: Strategic and critical thinking
As automation technology frees you from the rote and manual aspects of financial work, you'll have more time to focus on efficiency- and revenue-building activities. Delivering value to your organization and clients will require the ability to read and understand data, and think about it critically and strategically. As you work with more AI-powered systems that will help you spot large-scale patterns and trends, the ability to turn numbers into insight will give you essential knowledge into creating a roadmap for the future.
Skill No. 4: Anticipating and serving evolving needs
In addition to data analysis, you'll also need to recognize emerging requirements around you. Critical thinking will be necessary to help you ask the key questions to gain deeper understanding about which indicators are important and which are anomalies.
Another outcome of widespread automation adoption will be a new demand on finance professionals to innovate and develop creative solutions to business problems. This is good news in that it allows you to contribute great value to your organization and clients.
At the same time, complex problem-solving, adaptive thinking, and even future forecasting will be expected of top finance professionals. These roles will be transformed into centers of innovation.
Skill No. 5: Integration and collaboration
As you fill a more strategic and creative role as a finance professional, you'll also find that cross-functional collaboration increases. More than ever, finance professionals will need to work closely with people who have other skill sets and specialties. As the world becomes increasingly complex, you may need to work closely with subject matter experts, department heads, and other key players who can inform your work and help you develop the big-picture ideas that will be expected of you.
In a world where companies operate globally and employees increasingly work remotely, mastering virtual collaboration and management skills—sharing ideas and information with people in other places through various methods—also will be important.
Skill No. 6: Tech-savvy and data analytics
While it might seem obvious, virtually no job will be untouched by technology. To best spot new developments and recognize how they can benefit your business, develop and maintain both an enthusiasm for new technology, as well as intellectual curiosity about what's coming next. As machine learning becomes more sophisticated and new applications emerge, looking for ways to maximize their potential within your own or your client's organization can give you a competitive edge that less tech-savvy finance professionals don't have.
Skill No. 7: Functional and domain expertise
Roadmap Planner 1 7 – Strategic Planner Product Ideas Accounting Tools
Of course, even with enormous technological advancements, finance professionals must be skilled in their areas of expertise. Various roles require particular education, certifications, and competencies. In addition, this area of work often requires a code of ethical and moral behavior that earns the trust of those who put their finances and, sometimes, livelihoods in your hands.
Reskilling as a finance professional has traditionally meant continuing education and learning new aspects of the profession. As automation changes the very nature of our work, skills like communication, critical thinking, collaboration, and leadership will be increasingly in demand. While it may seem like new territory—perhaps even territory that is somewhat difficult to traverse—these skills also unlock exciting new opportunities for professional growth.
Note: This post first appeared in the Oracle Blog January 27, 2020 https://blogs.oracle.com/modernfinance/7-skills-every-accountant-needs-in-the-age-of-automation
Corporate planning is a type of strategic planning, responsible for mapping out a course of strategies and their implementations to empower top-management. It optimizes exposure, reach, leads, sales, profits, credibility, loyalty, sustainability, and opportunities of a business.
With the help of corporate strategic planning, a business can efficiently channelize corporate management by leveraging its resources with better acumen than the other market players.
Businesses of any size should incorporate such strategic planning, as it offers-
- Clarity & Direction
- Efficient use of resources
- A way of measuring progress
- Optimized decision-making
- Better coordination in business activities
- Effective allocation of responsibilities
- Motivation and guidance to members
- Analysis Strengths and weaknesses along with opportunities and threats via SWOT analysis, etc.
All in all, corporate planning empowers any kind of business to accomplish its business goals in a more effective and organized manner.
Corporate Planning Definition
Corporate Planning is defined as forming long-term goals and objectives within the organization's strengths and weaknesses in the existing and prospective environment.
This is done to ensure the achievement of their plans by combining their short-term and long-term objectives or bringing amendments in the structural working in the organization's composition.
In the words of David E. Hussey, writer of the book- Corporate Planning: Theory and Practice-
Corporate planning includes the setting of objectives, organizing the work, people and systems to enable those objectives to be achieved, motivating through the planning process and through the plans, measuring performance and so controlling progress of the plans and developing people through better decision-making, clearer objectives, more involvement, and awareness of progress.
What is Corporate Planning Strategy?
Corporate Planning is a strategic process applied by several business organizations to form a roadmap to grow in the market, enhance profits, gain industrial exposure, and strengthen brand identity.
It is a vital tool that successful business organizations use to leverage their existing resources better and more analytically than competitors.
It is the determination of business goals, formulation of diverse strategies for attaining objectives, transforming the goals into tactical plans, implementing and reviewing it to find out the progress of strategies, and finding out loopholes.
Different factors around which corporate planning is channelized via effective SWOT analysis and process of corporate management are-
- Creation of long-range corporate goals and objectives.
- Analysis of Macro and Micro Environments.
- Analysis of Strengths and weaknesses of the business
- Coordination between short term and long term business plans
- Structural changes in the business
- Implementation of the strategic plan as per business goals
- Adept use of scarce financial resources.
- Right evaluation of performance as well as feedback for purposeful corporate planning
Importance of Strategic Corporate Planning
In the current modern era, corporate planning holds a crucial position in a business organization, be it large-sized, medium, or even a new entrant.
The importance of corporate planning can be justified because some companies even hire departmental corporate managers to check the industry's current scenario and the current status of the organization in the market.
Some of the points that describe the need and importance of corporate planning are mentioned below:
1. Long-term goals
Corporate Planning broadly focuses on long-term goals and sets a blueprint to achieve them in a stipulated period. Long-term goals help an organization keep its core focus on maintaining its efforts, workforce, and efforts on a pre-decided target.
Corporate Planning keeps the employees engaged in their respective tasks with deadlines and ensures effectiveness and efficiency. It also brings harmony, peace, and cooperation among the employees and supervisors in a firm as they all smoothly work towards a common objective.
2. Focus
Roadmap Planner 1 7 – Strategic Planner Product Ideas Accounting System
A strategic business plan helps a business organization provide a focal point not to get deviated or distracted from its end goal. The first and foremost step of corporate planning involves devising a mission statement that tells the world its roles and objectives.
Formulation of a mission statement aids the firm stick to its focus, do all the requisite tasks, assign responsibilities to the employees, and evaluate their work to achieve that final destination.
3. Better Decisions
Developing a strategic plan helps a company make better decisions that are beneficial and helpful in attaining the mission statement. A corporate plan should be structured to spell all the information in the organization's interest, like the skills required with the employees, machinery or equipment required, etc.
Forming a roadmap to achieve the final goal helps the business people hire the best personnel for their form, arrange funds according to the tasks, and further invest in the most viable propositions.
4. A Measure of Success
Corporate planning also acts as a yardstick to determine an organization's success in achieving its goals. A firm shall periodically analyze its work to check its progress and make further amendments like replacing personnel, hiring more employees, arranging more funds, upgrading the machinery, etc.
Finding, evaluating, and analyzing the loopholes periodically that block the ways of achieving the mission statement helps in the upgradation of the work and ensure efficiency and effectiveness of the tasks devised. The touchstone function of corporate planning works best in the organizations that devise plans that allow for changes in attaining the tasks.
5. Saves money
The extra benefit associated with corporate planning is that it forms budgets that help save substantial sums. Budgeting allows a firm to allocate its financial resources to the projects that require it the most by cutting out unimportant expenses.
Having a detailed budget tells how much cash is earned, spent, or lent. This wipes out confusion regarding the amount of money allocated to different projects.
Objectives of Corporate planning in Management
Following are the basic objectives of corporate plans:
1. Setting a strategy
The fundamental objective of framing a corporate plan is setting a business strategy. At this stage, companies should look at the opportunities and analyze the threats in the market. For this, they can make a SWOT analysis and select viable propositions for investing their funds.
2. Planning the operations
Once a firm knows its mission statement, it can use these objectives and find ways of attaining them. The sole purpose of corporate planning is to help a firm plan and prepare a list of resources it requires to deliver to achieve its goals.
3. Monitoring and Control
There should be measurable indicators present in a strategic plan to evaluate the progress of the work rate vis-à-vis the initial plans. It mainly includes financial theory related to accounts, the value of output, etc.
4. Review
Establishing and forming well-devised instruments to devise annual reports is a crux to a successful corporate plan. Since the market environment constantly changes with events happening in the economy, a company regularly needs to review its plans, policies, and even rules and regulations associated with the operations.
Elements of Successful Corporate Plan
There are six elements in a successful corporate plan:
1. Gathering information
Having all the information related to the firm, industry, and competitors are the primary step towards a well-defined corporate plan. Either a business is big or small, it should be aware of the happenings in the market in its sectors, find out opportunities, grab them at the right moment and beware of the threats.
2. Set the objectives of the plan
Having a well-devised mission statement helps a firm stick to its focus of achieving it and keeps all the strategic work smooth in operations. Setting objectives helps form a clear mind about the work done, and the purpose of doing the work makes it fascinating.
3. Devise strategies to meet goals
Having a blueprint helps in effectively achieving the objectives. Forming strategies define the work to be done by the employees. Managers and leaders mainly devise strategies considering the funds available, personnel in the organization, and the deadline to achieve the requisite target. It brings efficiency to the operations of a business.
4. Implementing the plan
The next step is to implement the plans effectively. It involves the execution of the assigned tasks by the personnel within the guidelines and deadlines set. It involves the execution of the assigned tasks by the personnel within the guidelines and deadlines set.
5. Monitor plan performance
An organization should monitor its work by forming progress reports, finding the drawbacks, and work on them immediately.
6. Evaluate the effectiveness of the plan
In the end, a firm should see if the corporate strategy devised by it is competitive or up to the market standards. A plan should be challenging to achieve. A plan that is easy to achieve may not be a viable option in the existing scenario. This may require the organization to reset its plans and considering the market standards.
What to include in a Strategic Corporate Plan?
1. Vision statement
The vision statement of a business talks about business goals that it is supposed to achieve. While planning your corporate strategy, it is important to focus on your vision statement. You should also plan as per your short as well as long term goals. Your goals should be backed for your strategic planning, plus your goals should also be SMART.
2. Mission statement
Next thing upon which you should pay heed while making corporate planning is a mission statement. It tells you how you are going to achieve your vision statement. It will let you know what you are planning to offer, the target market, and the USP of your company. It will offer an elevator pitch to your corporate planning just in a few lines.
3. Resources and scope
Your corporate planning should also pay attention to things that you have in your organization such as your systems, structures, employees, products, accounting, assets, divisions, programs, finance, etc that play a key role in accomplishing your goals. You need to map the current structural existence of your organization to have a proper view of things incorporated and associated with your organization.
4. Objectives
You should also include different business objectives and the ways you are going to measure success in your corporate planning strategy. Here, your objectives need to be measurable, strategic, realistic, achievable, and time-driven. Including vague objectives in your corporate planning statement is of no use here. Different types of objectives might include financial objectives, customer objectives, internal objectives, learning, and growth objectives. Scrivener 3 1 5 esv.
5. Strategies
Finally, you should include strategies that will help you accomplish your business objectives. Such strategic planning can be for launching any new product, or decreasing labour costs by a certain percentage, but your strategies have to directly address the associated objectives. You should also chalk out a proper plan for implementing those strategies.
Corporate planning vs. Business Planning
Business planning involves strategies that a business uses and applies to attain its goals and objectives. Corporate planning consists of strategies that the employees follow to meet the objectives of an organization. The following points highlight the difference between corporate planning and business planning:
1. Interdependency
A business plan may exist without a corporate plan, but its strategies are linked with corporate plans. Without business planning, the goals and objectives of a firm would be ambiguous. Peakhour 3 1 1. Thus, both business plans and corporate plans are complementary to each other.
2. Effects
A planning process aids a business to succeed in the market and suggests new directions and amendments as per the industry's short as well as long-range requirements. Thus, there can be several diversified effects on business and corporate plans.
3. Considerations
Corporate planning reviews each step of the working of an organization devised for achieving the mission statement. However, a business plan focuses on the organization's overall goals, objectives, and progress. To evaluate the tasks, a business should consider several factors such as progress rate, personnel performance, requisite funds for further operations, and many more.
Corporate Planning Jobs in an Organization
Corporate Planning jobs fall under the broader career category of Chief Executives. Corporate planners are responsible for determining and formulating policies and strategies to offer an overall direction for the companies as per the guidelines suggested by the board of directors.
Strategy planning in such jobs revolves around planning, directing, and coordinating different activities at the top-most level of management by taking the services of staff managers and subordinate executives. Corporate planner jobs are also understood as strategic planner jobs.
Common corporate planning jobs are-
- Communicating with Supervisors, Peers, or Subordinates
- Getting Information from all relevant sources
- Communicating with Persons Outside Organization
- Directing, Guiding, and Motivating Subordinates
- Developing and Building Teams
- Establishing and Maintaining Interpersonal Relationships
- Developing Objectives and Strategies
- Monitoring and Controlling Resources
- Analyzing Data or Information
- Judging the Qualities of Things, People, and Services
- Resolving Conflicts and Negotiating with Others
- Evaluating Information to Determine Compliance with Standards
- Identifying Objects, Actions, and Events
- Interacting With Computers
- Organizing, Planning, and Prioritizing Work
- Interpreting the Meaning of Information for Others
- Updating and Using Relevant Knowledge
- Compiling, categorizing, coding, calculating, auditing, tabulating, or verifying information or data
- Coordinating the Work and Activities of Others
- Coaching and Developing Others
- Thinking Creatively
- Staffing Organizational Units
- Selling or Influencing Others
- Monitor Processes, Materials, or Surroundings
- Provide Consultation and Advice to Others
- Estimating the Quantifiable Characteristics of Products, Events, or Information
- Scheduling Work and Activities
- Performing Administrative Activities
- Training and Teaching Others
- Performing for or Working Directly with the Public
- Documenting/Recording Information
Wrapping Up!
The corporate planning process is an activity that involves a series of steps to be followed to achieve the end goal. Specifically, it involves a process that personnel in an organization does to achieve the mission statement.
The process to attain the end goal involves strategies at each level or department with clear and detailed tasks assigned to them within stipulated deadlines. The employees then execute the tasks assigned by their leaders and mentors following some guidelines.
Then managers and leaders analyze the work, make amendments to that, and suggest further improvement guidelines. The organization then check the viability of its plan in terms of its difficulty, market standards, and check whether it is practically achievable or not. Further changes to plans are made after evaluating previous plans to upgrade the formation of plans.
On the concluding note, we hope you would have understood what corporate planning is and how crucial it is for an effective business plan to get favorable outcomes.