Turning actuals into action: How unified consolidation and planning fuels agility
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How connected financial consolidation and planning unlock faster, more confident decisions.
Uncertainty can be a catalyst for business growth — but only if you’re ready for it.
When met with the right tools and mindset, uncertainty becomes a source of strategic opportunity. For those enterprises that are prepared to pivot, riding the wave of ongoing economic and market volatility can drive the business forward.
To capitalize, businesses must think — and act — differently. Against a backdrop of the current high rate of change, 61% of leaders in BDO Digital’s 2025 Techtonic States: The New Business Edge study said they believed resilience is now the most important quality a business can possess.
Resilience represents much more than the ability to weather a storm, or to bounce back from difficulty. It’s about building the agility to change course: responding with confidence to events, whether they’re internal or external.
But agility and resilience depend on having a clear and accurate view of the business, based on access to reliable, real-time financial data. Strategic foresight doesn’t happen by chance. Finance teams must provide leadership with the relevant insights they need to spot trends early and seize emerging opportunities.
The ability to take swift, decisive action is key to thriving in a volatile environment. However, in PwC’s May 2025 Pulse Survey, more than half (57%) of business executives admitted they’re missing opportunities because they can’t make decisions fast enough.
Rapid adjustments require seamless access to actuals
Faster access to actuals is critical to an organization’s ability to make necessary adjustments in the face of constant market shifts — and the business must have complete faith in that data. Only then will leadership be in a position to reforecast and shift approach to meet strategic objectives.
Real-time actuals also enhance planning by grounding scenario models in the most current data. This helps teams better understand different potential outcomes, and make faster, more informed decisions.
Unifying financial consolidation and planning empowers companies to make data-driven strategic decisions with confidence in response to evolving market conditions. The alignment of financial plans with actuals strengthens the adaptability and resilience of finance and accounting — and the business as a whole.
Adopting a platform which brings together advanced planning and consolidation capabilities enables you to generate real-time actuals and leverage them to automatically drive reforecasts, scenario modeling, and faster decisions.
What you need from your finance tech stack
Platforms such as Anaplan enhance your finance and accounting team’s ability to consolidate subsidiaries and report in a timely fashion. They improve efficiency and accuracy by pulling together diverse data from ERPs, general ledgers, and operational systems across subsidiaries and geographic divisions.
Key features that drive speed, agility, and accuracy include:
- Automation to replace the manual collection and updating of data, reducing the time spent on key tasks and providing real-time insights
- Built-in audit trails to streamline your year-end process and provide greater confidence in accuracy
- Pre-built, configurable templates and reports that work out-of-the-box to accelerate the closing of the books, and deliver fast and error-free consolidated actuals
- A cloud-native platform with no coding requirements that empowers finance and accounting to own and manage complex consolidations, with greater autonomy over the system and process
- Embedded compliance with regional regulations for consolidation and reporting to save time and help you to avoid rework
Aligned, actionable insights strengthen planning
Real-time integration of data across the enterprise — and across financial consolidation, reporting, and planning — supports collaboration and cross-functional alignment. It also prevents the delays and mistakes that happen when processes are siloed. A unified platform reduces errors and duplication of effort, while shared data ensures all reports are up-to-date and consistent.
With access to up-to-date actuals, the FP&A team can quickly build agile, data-driven plans for the upcoming cycle that ensure the business is ready for the next market shift. They can spot patterns and trends early, map out multiple future scenarios, and adjust forecasts with confidence.
Planning platforms that are infused with AI capabilities will enhance the ability to carry out scenario modeling and the dynamic visualization of options rapidly, and on a large scale. In addition, preconfigured, out-of-the-box planning templates allow finance teams to balance consistency with flexibility.
Become a future-ready enterprise
Unifying financial consolidation, reporting, and planning increases the speed and accuracy of strategic decision-making by allowing finance teams to provide actionable insights to leadership with confidence. Leaders can then make proactive, informed decisions that increase resilience and drive growth, even amid constant market shifts.
In short, real-time actuals build resilience by enabling faster responses to change.
Your business will be set up to capitalize on growth opportunities — equipped to anticipate, visualize, and plan for change rather than merely riding it out.