Today, we’re introducing KPIs & Covenants in Spotlight Forecasting—a new way to help you easily surface and report on the metrics that matter.
We’re introducing KPIs & Covenants in Spotlight Forecasting to strengthen your forecasting capabilities. Now you can quickly surface key performance indicators and loan covenants in one place to help monitor these metrics and to assist with decision making.
Your role as an Advisor or CFO has suddenly become even more critical and you are in a prime position to share your expertise and help your clients or business through these challenging times.
“It’s so important to remember the goal of measurement isn’t just to track change over time; it is to manage and plan for the impact of change as well. This is where our new KPIs & Covenants feature and your financial skills come together.
– Julie Francis, Spotlight Reporting CFO and Forecasting Product Owner
So, how would you use this? Let’s look at a couple of examples:
Debt is a necessary part of any business journey. Banks and other lenders use covenants as a key measure of risk and will regularly track the covenants of businesses they have lent to.
Debt to Equity Ratio and Interest Coverage Ratio are two metrics that businesses need to monitor. Use the drag and drop formula builder in Spotlight Forecasting to quickly create these ratios and produce a ready-to-share report with your client or Board.
A quick glance at the covenants will show all actual and forecasted values for the specified time period. You’ll see how the business in question is tracking against these covenants and also the projected position based on forecast data.
You may want to create some ‘what-if?’ scenarios and highlight how the business is likely to track against the covenants after changing various aspects of the business operations.
Help your clients or your own business gain useful insight by building multiple ‘what-if?’ scenarios and see how covenants behave with each scenario.
KPIs are great for advisors, CFOs, and business owners to help identify specific areas of the business that need attention, and can be used effectively to make decisions and changes to overall operations.
Identify some KPIs for your business or clients and include this new page in your forecast report. Some examples may be GP% or NP%, or you may want to highlight and track overall sales numbers on this page.
Use Spotlight Forecasting—including our KPIs & Covenants report—to try to stay on top of the rapidly changing environment and to assist in planning for eventualities that may impact your business.