What’s new in Cloudability Financial Planning

v1.1 – February 26, 2024

Summary

Today, we're unveiling Plan Alerts, a new feature designed to boost user awareness and foster increased accountability for cloud spending. With Plan Alerts, plan owners can seamlessly configure budget and forecast notifications for themselves and others within the plan. Unlike Cloudability's budget notifications which require individual setup by users, CFP plan alerts can be shared. This enables plan owners to create alerts for all cost owners within the plan, notifying them when spending exceeds or is projected to exceed their approved budget thus ensuring that cost owners stay informed about their spending performance relative to critical financial targets.

Additionally, alerts are now more flexible and can be configured for different time periods, including current month, quarter, or year, providing greater support for monitoring spend performance relative to quarterly or annual budget targets. Users also have control over the frequency of email notifications through new alert notification preferences.

We've also enhanced options for getting data in and out of plans. Plan owners can now import all plan data, enabling bulk edits to budget and forecast data. Previously, only forecast line-items could be exported, with no option for budget. Now, both budget and forecast line-items can be exported at full granularity, facilitating integration with other systems. Furthermore, all forecast data, including Baseline and Adjustment line-items, can be imported, simplifying the process of updating baseline amounts and modifying adjustments.

Additionally, we've made some quality-of-life improvements. On the plan listing page, users can now toggle between viewing all plans or only those in the current view, streamlining navigation, especially for finance or other team members with access to multiple plans across various views. Clicking on a plan will automatically switch to the correct view and open the plan.

We've enhanced hover-over infotips on Budget and Forecast KPIs used in the Variance reports to provide greater coverage and clearer explanations of the calculations involved, reducing confusion about KPI numbers.

Finally, the Refresh Report button on various report pages now refreshes the data available to ApptioBI, ensuring users have access to the most up-to-date information in their customer dashboards and reports.

Alerts

Alerts provide a convenient way to proactively notify cost owners about spending performance relative to key financial targets established in the plan.  Personal alerts can be setup by any user with access to the plan.  Plan owners can create shared alerts and specify the users to receive the email notification when the alert triggers.

Alerts are flexible and can be setup to evaluate spending performance against different targets (budget or forecast), time periods, and filter conditions.

To create and edit alerts:

1.     Select the Alert option via the Plan actions menu (ellipsis button in the Plan header).

2.     Use the New Alert button to create an alert. 

3.     Alternatively, click on the ellipsis icon in the table row to edit an existing alert.

4.     Use the Plan selector to change plans.  The alert listing will refresh to show all alerts for the selected plan.

5.     Click the Change link (in header, under Plan selector) to modify your email notification preferences.

6.     Press the back arrow (next to the Manage Alerts header) to exit Alert management.

Fig 1: Alerts management page 

Fig 2: Alert configuration options

Fig 3: Alert Sharing options

Import / Export

Import and Export actions are available now on Forecast and Budget line-item tables.   You can now export out Forecast (or Budget) line-items, make modifications in Excel, and re-import the changes to quickly bulk edit the entire plan.  (Note: currently, Import/Export actions are available only for Plan Owners).

To Import:

1.     Select the Import action via the ellipsis menu on the line-item table (top right corner).

2.     Select (or drag/drop) a CSV file you wish to import.  (Use the Export action to get a CSV file you can use as a template). 

Note: you can import both Baseline and Adjustment line-items on either Forecast tab.  Simply use the Spend Type column to tag the line-item as either Baseline or Adjustment.

To Export:

1.     Select the Export action via the ellipsis menu on the line-item table (top right corner).

2.     Specify a location to save the exported data.

Fig 4: Budget Import dialog

Quality of Life Enhancements

To show Plans from all views

1.     Click the toggle button on the Plan listing page to switch between viewing all plans you have access to and just plans in the current view

2.     If the View column isn’t shown, you can add it via the Columns option in the table sidebar

3.     Clicking on a Plan will automatically navigate to the view and open the plan

Fig 5: Show all Plans toggle

KPI infotips

1.     Hover over the blue ‘I’ icon to view a description of each KPI

2.     Note that the definitions of some KPIs change when the time period is monthly

Fig 6: KPI infotips

Refresh Report enhancements

The Refresh Report button now does the following:

1.     refreshes Actuals and Estimate values used by all reports in the plan

2.     updates plan dimensions to include any newly found dimension values in Actuals

3.     publishes all plan data to ApptioBI (refreshes Actuals, Estimate, Forecast and Budget metrics)