Whatever your need may be, Plum Solutions consulting services can fit your needs and your budget. For customised solutions, a fixed quote can be provided, or ongoing services can be arranged on an hourly or daily rate. Casual enquiries welcome!
From a simple formula fix to redesigning an inherited model, we’ll get a model working to suit your needs.
Consulting Services
- Business Cases
- Profitability Analysis / Activity Based Costing
- Budgeting
- Management Reporting
- Forecasting
- Performance Metrics
- Financial modelling
Business Cases
Do you have a new product or venture you are considering? Translating business ideas from vague concepts into a concrete set of numbers can be the hardest part of getting a new product idea or business off the ground. We can put some numbers behind your ideas to assess the financial feasibility of your project. Using your assumptions, a business case model adds a financial backbone to your concepts.
All Plum Solutions business cases include a cost benefit analysis of the project, and come with financial models which can be adjusted to test sensitivities to basic assumptions, scenario planning and break even analysis.
Profitability Analysis / Activity Based Costing
Do you know which products are making you money? Do you know which customers are the most profitable? The well-known 80/20 states 80% of your profit usually comes from 20% of your customers – but which 20%? We can create a product or customer profitability or activity-based costing model which will show you where you should be concentrating your efforts.
Budgeting
Dreading budget time? Plum Solutions can provide an on-site budgeting specialist to guide your budgeting and reporting process or manage it from beginning to end.
Plum Solutions can create a simple budget Excel spreadsheet for your business, or something more integrated with your current financial systems. The budget can be a simple one page report, or if necessary it will be a multi-dimensional model which is based on multiple drivers customised to your business, e.g. headcount or number of units sold. These can be sent out to various departments or locations and then collated centrally.
Management Reporting
Once you have your budget, the next step is then to compare budget versus actual income and expenses. A dynamic report will automatically update with your current actual figures, so you can see how your business is tracking against budget. A low maintenance user-friendly report can be created, or management pack you can easily maintain yourself, or we can provide a monthly reporting and variance analysis service.
Forecasting
Once you have created a budget and related this to actual numbers, you can create a dynamic rolling forecast which can be updated on a regular basis. This can be done on a weekly or even daily basis to give you a more accurate and up to date picture of cash flow and profit and loss.
Performance Metrics
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Scorecards and Dashboard reports can all provide financial and non-financial indicators of the performance of individual staff members, departments and the business as a whole. A user-friendly report can be created for your own use, or Plum Solutions can provide a monthly reporting service.
Financial modelling
Plum Solutions builds customised models for virtually any purpose. Examples include:
- A comparison calculator which translates a complicated pricing structure so consumers can find the best deal.
- A capital expenditure model in Access used to approve, capture and report on company-wide capital expenditure.
- A survey model used to capture data from customers surveyed. The model then automatically manipulates the data to produce customised reports and graphs in Excel.
- A business case which calculates the expected number of customers using take-up rates based on demographic information.
- A competitor analysis with results shown using dynamic Excel graphs which can be easily modified by the user to display the desired combination of variables.
