Connected planning

Business planning and reporting often span multiple planning, PowerTable, and intelligence sheets, with each sheet capturing data at a different level of detail. Organizations typically consolidate this data to create enterprise-wide reports, financial statements, and executive dashboards. This enables detailed planning at the operational level while providing aggregated insights for decision-makers.

Common scenarios include:

• Enterprise budgeting: Regional finance teams prepare budgets for individual countries or business units. The data is then consolidated into a corporate budget for executive review.
• Workforce and expense planning: Human Resources plans employee salaries and benefits at the individual employee level, while Finance creates departmental operating expense (OPEX) budgets using aggregated personnel costs.
• Sales and financial reporting: Sales teams forecast revenue and cost of goods sold (COGS) by product or SKU. The planned values are rolled up into consolidated profit and loss (P&L) statements at the business unit or company level.
• Manufacturing planning: Production planners estimate demand and inventory requirements for individual materials or components. Operations managers review the results as summarized production volumes by plant, product line, or region.
• Cost center budgeting: Department managers prepare budgets for individual cost centers, including labor, travel, software, and facility expenses. Finance consolidates these budgets to produce company-wide expense reports and executive dashboards.
• Capacity planning: Operations teams forecast customer demand or production volumes in one planning sheet. The forecast is then used to calculate staffing requirements, shift schedules, or equipment capacity in related planning sheets.

Use case: budget planning#

In industries such as FMCG, retail, consumer goods, and pharmaceuticals, budgets are often planned by geography and then broken down by product portfolio.

Regional budget planning

Regional finance teams maintain separate revenue budgets — they create and manage budgets for their respective regions, such as North America, Europe, and APAC. Each planning sheet contains customer-level planning data, including Average Revenue per Customer, and Gross Revenue Budget.

Corporate budget planning

Corporate budgets provide a centralized planning sheet for creating and reviewing organization-wide financial plans. It combines key financial measures, such as revenue, cost of goods sold (COGS), and gross margin, to support financial planning and analysis.

Consolidate the regional plans within Infobridge

• Import each regional budget into the Infobridge sheet.
• Append the regional datasets to combine all regional records into a single consolidated dataset. The appended dataset contains the Gross Revenue Budget across all regions.

After a planning sheet is uploaded to Infobridge, its measures and dimensions become available in the Queries section of the Data pane. You can then import them into other planning sheets and intelligence sheets.

In the Corporate Budget planning sheet, assign the consolidated Gross Revenue Budget from the Queries section to the Values data well. This imports the measure from InfoBridge.

Changes made to the regional budgets are automatically reflected in the Corporate Budget. For instance, finance teams increase the EU regional revenue budget for Q1 from 2611.69 million to 2620 million.

The budget increase is automatically reflected in the consolidated corporate budget.

This workflow enables regional teams to plan independently while providing corporate finance with a single consolidated revenue budget for enterprise-wide reporting and planning.