Interactivity modelling, with resilience
The key to making good decisions is to take into account all the information at your disposal and involve all those in your team who may have critical experience and judgement to apply to the situation in hand. When it comes to financial decisions, using a financial plan, it’s all about interactive modelling.
Whereas enterprise solutions clearly score when it comes to handling large amounts of data across many countries and departments, they can’t supply the level of interactivity that accountants refer to as “modelling their business”. So in order to model your business do you have to sacrifice the resilience and integrity that you would get from a corporate database system, or is it possible to have both?
Even the largest corporations in the world (who will certainly have at least one corporate database as well) still revert to Excel for interactive decision-making… for flexing assumptions and “business drivers” in order to get a feel for how their business results will be impacted by possible decisions they may make. Only when you have an entire model of the business there at your fingertips can this level of judgement be captured – the so-called perceptive process. Whilst in theory, it should be possible to do this in a pure software solution, the ease and comfort with which it can be done in Excel has never been matched.
At the same time we all accept that it is just not good enough to rely on handbuilt Excel for everything we do. The Rugged Logic answer to this is to provide the kernal of the logic (that is, how the working capital, financial instruments etc, are all modelled) as a core that has been constructed using a formal methodology on a server computer. A corporate database structure also gives this level of integrity “out-of-the-box”, but in reality Excel is still used for the top level business modelling.
