We live in a world where artificial intelligence is part of our everyday lives. Super-intelligent machines are changing the way we do everything, from forecasting weather to understanding the building blocks of life.But when it comes to financial planning, there’s a distinct lack of intelligence in the way most companies work.
They hire teams of highly trained finance professionals to spend hours and days pouring over spreadsheets to compile past data, and attempting to analyse it. Using this ‘insight’, they try to create projections that CEOs and CFOs use to determine the strategic direction of the company.
What really happens is that they end up taking an average of the past 10 years’ numbers, factoring in a couple of emerging trends, slapping 10% on top of that and using that as a target.
We call these people ‘spreadsheet jockeys’. And the fact is that for all their smart people and good intentions, they’re essentially guessing about the most important issues facing businesses.
How big can their businesses become?
How much should they invest in growth to get there?
How do they make better strategic business decisions along the way?
There has to be a better way.
At Kohort, we believe – no, we know – that all crucial and intelligent decisions are data-driven.
We believe forecasting should be way more bottom up than it is top down.
We want finance teams around the world to move from a situation where they are engaging in guesswork, to one where they are empowered with data science.
We want businesses to be able to predict their next quarter’s revenue within a percentage point of accuracy.
We want their forecasting to be automatically refreshed so it is always up to date. And if the forecast changes, we want to know exactly what the underlying cause was and how to fix it.
We want CFOs to be able to tell you if numbers are up or down because of something the company has done, or something external - like the weather.
We want companies to know if they are wasting budget, or underinvesting in terms of marketing budget. Either is negligent. No excuses.
We use proprietary software to interpret data in a way that takes the guesswork out of the future – making the future known, as it were.
This, in a nutshell, is what we are building.