As any food and beverage CFO knows, the F&B industry often has to operate under fairly challenging circumstances.

One of the biggest of these just might be fluctuating food costs. While it’s true that people need to eat no matter what, we all know that changes in food cost, as well as ups and downs in the economy, have a big impact on the foods people buy and how much they’re willing to spend.

And yet, despite this, many food and beverage companies are still working off of annual budgets rather than implementing rolling forecasting.

While the annual budget isn’t going away any time soon, lots of businesses – both F&B and other industries – have found that a rolling forecasting can be a more efficient and accurate way of managing their finances.

This is especially true for industries that are highly susceptible to market changes. That’s why a rolling forecasting model, especially when it’s part of a full budgeting and forecasting solution like True Sky, can work so well for a food and beverage company.

Forecasting can help your company stay agile

Agility is the name of the game in today’s business world. After all, if the price of oysters suddenly goes through the roof due to something like a hurricane off the Gulf Coast, your business could suddenly be facing some very different realities, almost overnight.

By using rolling forecasts, businesses can gain an accurate idea of where they’ll be in the next month or three months, while still allowing for major change to occur. If your business needs to switch directions, it’s easy to update your forecast to reflect that.

Access your data in real time

One huge benefit of True Sky for all businesses is the ability to update and access your data in real time. As a centralized budgeting and forecasting solution, data that you or your team enters is automatically updated on the server.

This means that everyone is always on the same page – there’s no need to worry whether you’re looking at last week’s numbers or this week’s.

When you’re monitoring metrics frequently, access to real-time data isn’t just helpful, it’s necessary. You need to know how changing numbers will impact your bottom line on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis. True Sky allows you to do that.

Better understand your business drivers and gain more insight from your data

The most successful companies are masters at understanding their business drivers through analytics. With all the tools available today for analytics and data collection, businesses that aren’t taking advantage of them are missing out on an important source of information.

This data can be put to great use in a forecasting model, allowing CFOs and their teams to connect the dots between, as mentioned before, a sudden change in the price of oysters and a drop in profitability.

And with True Sky, this data can become even more useful. True Sky’s interface allows users to attach documents and comments to entries, so your team can record the explanations or assumptions behind the numbers.

Deploy True Sky quickly and with minimal training

Given the choice between complex, lengthy implementation and quick and easy implementation, every business will choose the latter. You want to keep your business operating on all cylinders, without taking excessive amounts of time out for system implementation or staff training.

True Sky uses the Excel interface, which is familiar to almost anyone who went to high school after 1990. This means that users – even those who aren’t in the finance department – can be up to speed on the system quickly and are less likely to develop their own workarounds or keep data in separate documents.

Could your food and beverage company benefit from True Sky? To learn more about how True Sky can help, take a look at this chart.