Whether you are a startup or a Fortune 500 company, there is a high likelihood that all or a significant amount of your financial planning and forecasting is done in Excel. It is just there, easily accessible on your desktop. You can organize your spreadsheet exactly how you understand your business. You can get your results quickly and you are in control of the analysis.
One drawback of Excel is that each workbook is a snapshot, and there is no way to quickly store data to support trending and analysis or to better control data sharing. For example, you might want to compare your new forecasts with other forecasts that were performed previously. Now with xFinancials you can simply take your workbook and within minutes begin storing data in the cloud with xFinancials. With the data in xFinancials, you can then share specific data with specific people without having to share the whole workbook. They can get a notification when you update your forecast, and they can easily download the data into Excel to populate a custom dashboard report or to use for their own analysis. Your workbook methods or sensitive data are not exposed in the process of sharing data. And if you want to compare results or forecasts, over time, all the data is available for that analysis.
I know what you’re thinking, “It’s going to be complicated, there must be something complex that I have to learn to make this work.” However, with xFinancials all the work to tag your important data is done in Excel. You never have to leave the comfortable confines of Excel in order to store and retrieve data. If you don’t already have a good solution spreadsheet that you comfortable with, xOverTime has templates, as part of the xFinancials, which users can modify to meet the needs of their project or growing organization.
With your forecasts and financials in xFinancials, you can share data with other departments or staff in more automated ways as well. Enterprise systems that need access to this information can retrieve the data using the xFinancials Rest API capability. Instead of getting many calls every month regarding forecast and financial information, because you can’t afford to email your workbook to everyone, just identify what you want to be shared and with whom and let them retrieve it whenever they want. They can even get notifications whenever you update the data. And you can get statistics on who has reviewed and downloaded the information and when!
Just when you thought you’d seen it all with Excel, wait till you see how easy it is to store data, control data sharing, and retrieve data using xFinancials. We’re excited to be offering what we believe is a big step toward more secure and collaborative Excel data sharing for companies of all sizes!
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