The Solution for Capex
Estimate capital project costs and benefits, compare long-term portfolio planning scenarios, build annual capital budgets, track actuals, forecast remaining spend and report on performance in a single, state-of-the-art cloud platform purpose-built for the enterprise.
Leading companies globally count on Finario's capital planning software
Streamline customary Capex
or conquer capital project investment complexity
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Putting strategic capital allocation into practice
Aligning capital investment with long-term strategy. Selecting the best projects.
Adjusting dynamically as conditions and opportunities warrant.
These are the hallmarks of the best performing companies.
It starts with a commitment, then continues with execution.
Prioritize the right projects
Long-term Strategy
Create multi-year capital project portfolio scenarios, adapt to a changing business environment and improve capital allocation.
Capital Budgeting
Streamline the annual budgeting process and accurately track performance across fiscal years and your evolving organizational structure.
Capex Approvals
Automate request management with a purpose-built system that eliminates manual workarounds and maintenance headaches.
Forecast more accurately
Actuals Tracking
Create a single source of truth with actual payment data injected from your ERP into capital plans & forecasts.
Cash Flow Forecasting
Capture up-to-date forecasts directly from project managers and generate accurate reporting automatically.
Spend Analytics
Get in-depth project-level data and performance insights with a powerful ad-hoc query builder.
Improve ROI & risk evaluation
Project Financials
Build project costs estimates easily at the level you need for effective project forecasting and management.
ROI Modeling
Ensure that returns are estimated and calculated correctly and consistent metrics made readily available for decision makers.
Risk Management
Standardize project risk evaluation and scoring, monitor mitigation planning and deliver better risk-adjusted returns.
Report on capital performance
Stage Gates
Manage material projects down to the cost level with your stage gate process exactly the way you have always envisioned.
Progress Reporting
Get detailed project and fiscal period reporting and alerts in real time; operate smarter and more efficiently
Post Completion Review
Instill a culture of continuous improvement with “project lookbacks” on cost, ROI and lessons learned.
Connect Capex across your enterprise
Better communication about Capex leads to better results. Not just in terms of improved capital project decision making and return on capital invested, but across the enterprise. For example, Finario can feed an accurate forecast of global capital spending by currency to your treasury system to improve enterprise liquidity management.
Benefits every stakeholder
FP&A
Generate multiple project portfolio scenarios, streamline budgeting and have greater confidence in Capex forecasts.
Operations
Improve project selection and capital allocation. Drive continuous improvement with post-completion audits.
IT
Improve data integration and security, reduce recurring maintenance effort and delight business users.
Procurement
Cover more spend and drive further cost saving. Leverage existing software investments. Elevate your strategic profile.
Reliable. Secure. Easy to use.
CLOUD TECHNOLOGY
Optimum operational performance
for ensured availability.
SOC-2 CERTIFIED
The highest level of security to protect the interests of your organization.
OPEN INTEGRATION
Seamlessly integrate with Coupa, SAP, Oracle and other enterprise systems.
Explore what's new in the Capex Resource Center
Let us help you build your business case for Capex software excellence
Run our ROI calculator to get a sense of the potential financial impact of a Finario implementation
Attend our monthly public demo — the fastest, easiest way to get to know Finario and what it can do for your organization
Request our Capex Benchmark Assessment to help gauge how your organization is performing against best practices
FAQs
What is capital planning software?
Whether you consider 50 capital projects a year, 500 or 5,000, there are myriad factors to evaluate in determining which deserve to be budgeted, and why. You want to consider projects individually and holistically to ensure the right balance of sustaining operations while best positioning the company for growth. And looking ahead, you want to ensure that essential data for every project “travels” with it through the budgeting, approval, forecasting and reporting cycles.
Capital planning software automates and streamlines critical Capex processes, and enables finance leaders to assess and consistently compare each material project’s strategic value, ROI and other investment criteria to make the most informed decisions. It’s why an enterprise capital planning solution like Finario is such an important component of the modern finance tech stack.
What is Capex software?
Whether you consider 50 capital projects a year, 500 or 5,000, there are myriad factors to evaluate in determining which deserve to be budgeted, and why. You want to consider projects individually and holistically to ensure the right balance of sustaining operations while best positioning the company for growth. And looking ahead, you want to ensure that essential data for every project “travels” with it through the budgeting, approval, forecasting and reporting cycles.
Purpose-built Capex software automates and streamlines critical Capex processes, and enables finance leaders to assess and consistently compare each material project’s strategic value, ROI and other investment criteria to make the most informed decisions.
Key benefits include:
– A more efficient capital budgeting process and annual plan for Capex investments
– ROI metrics calculated correctly and consistently on all material projects
– Capex request approval process moves smoothly without manual intervention or workarounds
– Actuals fed automatically from your ERP(s) into a single system of record for capital forecasting and variance analysis
– Makes it easy for HQ at all times to know exactly where each business unit and all of its projects stand in relation to budget and proposed completion dates
– Post-completion reviews can be easily performed on time and that intelligence leveraged by others on their projects
How does Finario compare to a workflow solution built on a form-builder platform?
Vendors of generic workflow tools tout the “flexibility” and “customization” that their systems provide as the answer to a multitude of problems. But for a process that is inherently financial such as Capex, these attributes are a mirage, describing nothing more than the ability to label and move fields around on a page form. The fields themselves are inherently dumb with no understanding of fiscal years or how all the complex data associated with capital planning inter-relates. No matter how much time, effort or cost one might put into customizing such a system, the end result will inevitably be a pale imitation of a true financial planning system purpose built for the job. You wouldn’t consider for even a moment trying to custom build an ERP or CPM/EPM solution on such a tool, and trying to create a capital planning on such a narrow foundation would be an equally risky and costly mistake.
How does Finario compare to a SharePoint solution?
Historically, many organizations have customized generic workflow applications such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft SharePoint to manage Capex approvals. While seemingly a sound choice since they are often already in use for many other internal processes, it’s typically “tough road to hoe” given the complexity of Capex and most deployment “conclude” well short of the original aims, leaving business users frustrated and IT stuck with repeated requests to engineer manual workarounds.
Moreover, as approval is just one small step in the much larger capital planning and management process, these organization continue to rely on spreadsheets for capital budgeting, forecasting and reporting. This not only wastes time and leaves them exposed to errors and security risks, but short changes decision makers tasked with employing the enterprises capital wisely.
Finario, in contrast, was purpose-built for full life-cycle capital and portfolio management, combining a robust project analysis foundation with sophisticated financial intelligence to provide world leading performance for companies that care about Capex. As a cloud-native solution, deployment is rapid and risk-free.
What's the difference between a project budget and capital budget?
A project budget is simply the total funding that has been approved to complete a specific capital project, independent of time frame. A capital budget is the total funding an organization has set aside in one fiscal year to fund all of the expenses occurring on approved projects during that fiscal year. As an example, the difference can be seen clearly in a particular expenditure within a project that was expected to occur in October of FY 2021 that is delayed to March of FY 2022. There is no change to the project budget but there is a positive variance for the FY 2021 capital budget as well as the need to allocate funds from the FY 2022 capital budget to complete the project. So when evaluating applications that purport to support capital budgeting, be sure to validate whether it’s truly capital budgeting and whether, for example, the system can provide historically accurate budget and variance reporting over the years as your organizational structure changes due to growth, M&A and the evolving nature of your business.
How does Finario compare to an EPM solution?
Enterprise Performance Management applications, with their focus on departmental budgeting, treat capital projects as merely a line item. Total project cost, or total cost by month and associated depreciation. While, yes, there is some simple workflow, it’s rarely enough for the typical complexity of a Capex approval process in a large enterprise.
Finario is built around projects (called “investments” within the application). A large investment can contain dozens of costs, each with their own month-by-month cash flow along with a written rationale, ROI model, file storage and other capabilities enabling analysis and management of the project. The template is flexible to allow as much information as necessary on large or strategic investments, or the bare minimum for small routine expenditures. And each investment’s cost detail is automatically consolidated into a multitude of budgeting and forecasting reports by entity and fiscal year – giving FP&A professionals exactly the information they need.
Finario also tracks each investment’s progress as a project against its budgeting and approved project goals, which may span multiple fiscal periods. This data is automatically rolled up into a bevy of reports and tools that give operations and procurement executives the information they need to manage projects intelligently and optimize the overall project portfolio.
So, while an EPM and an “EPM for Capex” such as Finario offer budgeting and forecasting functionality, the focus and depth of information is very different. Which is why any business with meaningful Capex will need a Capex-centric solution in addition to an EPM.
What is Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)?
According to many, return on invested capital (ROIC) is the most important metric of financial value creation. In a nutshell, ROIC divides after-tax operating profit by invested capital, and paints a clear picture of how effectively a company is using that capital. Basically, the better return you can produce on your capital, the more investors will pay for your company.