To this day we debate the level of personnel planning we should be doing. Currently, we have built all the calculations to go to the lowest level and calculate all taxes & benefits by individual but once I did apply just % rates on the a higher level and that worked too.
It all depends on what are you trying to achieve. If want to calculate cost per employee with a department or area, then I would suggest setting up calculations and global vectors etc for all the states and the min/max of capping as well. That is quite a work to setup and a bit cumbersome to update.
If you are planning to combine all the tax accounts in to on and move it to Finance cube and use that data then % rate works as well. My results were much better when I did that but we needed additional data by person so we went back to using the detailed method.
So it all depends on you CFO on how detail they want to drill in. So CFO are ok with applying assumption set and some prefer exact calculations. Hence, I have done both and I prefer the less detail way as I was able to reproduce the same results with a better flow during the year.
Thank for the comment. Well there is nothing crazy behind the picture. I was checking out a close by island near Cuba and there was this awesome guy with his pets. These were his pets and he was playing with them. He saw my excitement and asked me if I want to play with the crocodile, quite a friendly guy and vola this picture came into being. The funny thing is as I held the crocodile in my arms, the other pet just jumped to be on my shoulder.
I got excited when you mentioned Mattress Firm. I actually visited them down in Houston a couple times last year to implement phase 2 - a forecast impairment model! We took their Brick & Mortar stores, gathered various forecasting assumptions, and used Prophix to do various top-down and bottom-up calculations. Including a NPV calc! The Mattress Firm FP&A team went from 2-4 weeks of manual labor to get their impairment results, to a matter of hours!!
My question is, you had mentioned Sleep Country is continuously re-forecasting and running scenario analysis - are you currently running any impairment analysis like I mentioned above? If you are, I’m curious to hear how your model works and if there are any similarities/differences to Mattress Firm.
Also - love that you spoke about utilizing Prophix as a way to improve existing processes. We love to hear use cases where customers didn’t simply copy and paste their existing processes into Prophix!
Thank you for the comment and its great meeting you as well. Our model is quite simple for impairment testing. Hence, we have build it in excel and its plugged into our 3 to 5 year financial model which is feed by prophix pulls and few little external pull. Currently, as we redesign the new cube we might like to revisit.
On the other note, initially the first implementation done with Prophix was a replica of the older system and this was done slightly before my time. There were for of static accounts and calculation which caused the system to be extremely slow. It took quite a bit of time to untangle the model.
