TABLE OF CONTENTS Planning unifies diverse activities, providing a 'road map' for the undertaking of complete tasks that must be well co-ordinated, accomplished over extended time frames and inclusive of many people.
R.K. Wysocki and J. Young, Information Systems Management Principles in Action, 1990.
Financial planning is a popular spreadsheet application, which often involves acquiring a sales forecast, perhaps using one of the models or methods described in Part 1 of this book, and then specifying all the resources necessary to ensure that the forecast targets are reached. Financial planning can be performed for an entire organisation, or for a department or division. When separate divisional profit plans are developed they may subsequently be incorporated into a corporate plan.
The financial plan described in this chapter is a one year quarterly plan for a manufacturing company. It is a deterministic plan and assumes point estimates for the opening input values, as well as the growth and cost factors. In this example all growth rates and cost factors remain the same for the duration of the plan. The completed model can be found on the CD accompanying this book under the name FINPLAN.
The plan consists of six separate worksheets. The first is a Data Input sheet. For this example all the input data has been grouped onto one sheet, but in some situations, if there is a large amount of input, it might be preferable to break the input down into multiple sheets. The second worksheet...
