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10 Dec 2007
Many Accountancy Age readers will know of Paul as a past President of the ICAEW. So it was of interest when speaking to him last Friday that he informed me that he has become Executive Chairman of Rugged Logic - a developer of forecasting software for accountants. Paul has been involved with Rugged Logic for some time. However following a reorganisation he has taken on an executive role and is in the process of carrying out some restructuring work on the company. In a previous life ran Druckman IT - a provider of accounting software.
Rugged Logic has been around since 2003 and its technology has been developed around Microsoft Excel. Industry sources suggest that Rugged Logic has had a tough time getting their business off the ground and it will be interesting to see how it is reshaped under Paul’s leadership.
Accountants may wonder why it is necessary to buy a third party tool for forecasting. Most accounting applications offer a capability for forecasting and there have been a number of vendors supplying forecasting tools for 20 plus years. I suspect part of the reason for this is that when forecasting becomes complex IT tools can make the forecasting process more rather than less complex. Excel offers a basic structure but out of the box needs a lot of work to create a robust, easy to use forecasting application. The challenge for a vendor is how to create a sophisticated, yet easy to use application for this sort of requirement. The challenge for a user is how to ensure they get trained properly on the tool and subsequently manage the deployment, often to a large number of employees. Sadly in the past this has been something that many (most?) organisations struggle with.
To get IT right it is of course important that you have the right tool for the job. However the success of most projects depends on an organisations ability to manage change. More on this subject in future postings
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Briefings
By looking at the reasons supplier statements became unfashionable, and the reasons why it is different today, this paper delves into the many benefits that can be obtained by automating the process.
Having a real and true view of your organisation’s current financial position, and having the right systems and processes in place, will ensure that you can make strong choices and are ready to capitalise on opportunities
AccountancyAgeInsight is a frequently updated resource centre for finance professionals, offering a free and easy-to-use digital library of briefings, white papers and other information resources. 
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In reality very little has been provided in those 20 years for the complete task of producing a consistent business reforecast every month for the whole budget period (e.g. P&L, balance sheet and cashflow for every period in the next 3 years), the notable exception being at the low end, Sage Financial Forecasting (née WinForecasting). It's true that accounting packages often have a module called cashflow forecast but these tend to just do the near-term practical job of projecting the unwinding of the existing debtor book etc and don't go close to what the board needs for the pack each month.
So absolutely - by preference most FD's still do it all in Excel, whether or not they then feed the forecast back into another system to store and manage the data. To my knowledge Rugged Logic is the only company that sets out to help the FD with this vital task... that of producing a detailed forecast in Excel, with all the flexibility of this powerful environment that he knows and loves, whilst at the same time getting the "ruggedness" of tools and a process that are accredited by the ICAEW.
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