FORECAST5: Making Governments win their ‘Data Game’

Country-wide local governments create extensive volumes of data, providing considerable knowledge and success opportunities. For local administrators, extracting and reviewing this decision-making data is always a manual and time-consuming process.

The organization has implemented a series of policy support tools that help simplify these activities and generate efficiencies, to allow more analytical views and information. Forecast5 Analytics enables municipal administrations to enhance their financial planning plans.

The company has developed specific analysis tools for government managers. Founded in 2012, and has a head office located in Naperville, Illinois.

The beginning of an era of FORECAST5

To make profound and constructive impacts on the decision-making of local governments, Forecast 5 Analytics was created in 2012. The directors had worked a substantial amount of time before Forecast 5 was born, dealing with public sector financial management problems.

A major conviction for this business is to have a comprehensive 5-Year Fiscal Prognose from any local authority, including colleges, cities, and counties, that ultimately led to its name.

For the past six years, the company’s growth activities have been centered on the creation of local government decision support tools. Apart from performance benchmarking, budget growth, multi-annual financial forecasts, and capital utilization preparation, business clients use applications in various ways.

Private sector has been extensively used tools for over a decade in the field of financial analytics and business intelligence technologies. Forecast5 has been giving public sector the same opportunity.

What Shaped FORECAST5?

Forecast5 Analytics, Inc. President and CEO of Mike English. Asked about the motivation behind Forecast 5 Analytics, he says “In reality, the road to starting Forecast5 was an extension of other work and projects we did during the first 20 years of my career”.

In the 1990s, we had the chance to set up two start-ups, a licensed SEC broker, and a registered investment consultant. FORECAST5 has always tried to see their customers and to wonder how to better fulfill their long-term aspirations from a financial viewpoint as part of an investment strategy operation.

It leads the team and me to start worrying about government organizational and policy decisions and how their financial profile was influenced.

How is FORECAST5 successful?

Forecast5 is seeing local councils increasingly using comparative analytics to direct decisions on budgeting and hiring. 75-80 percent of the spending is distributed to ‘citizens’ in the rest of the government sector.

By providing benchmarking tools to provide transparency into issues like benefits, health care rates, pension duties, and employee ratios, Forecast5 will help their clients develop a viewpoint on how to schedule and budget those expenses. Forecast5 will illuminate ways to look at the budgeting process differently by offering a broad field of vision through Forecast5 items.

Forecast5 also sees fantastic ways to influence the end-of-month accounting process. With new efficiencies in the monthly reporting phase, Fourth Forecast5 enables CFOs to expend more resources to assess expenditure variances and to provide opportunities for assessing deviation situations and improving project planning for the year-end.

Final Words about Forecast5

In Forecast5 partnerships with their customers, they were wise enough to build versatile options and then keep an open eye and ear. Forecast5 was also lucky to be able to collaborate on a host of findings and possibilities with representatives of the government sector.

Forecast5 has had to overcome several important questions. One problem is the fact that many of their customers operate on legacy accounting platforms that do not have a lot of analytical and visual ‘bells and whistles.’ So Forecast5 needs to build a forum for analytics to work alongside any accounting tools that their customers use to meet this challenge.

The consistency of the baseline budget is the second problem in every budget prediction. When an estimate is based on a budget planned with so much conservativeness, the financial projection will exacerbate the fluff and the projection is imprecise. Their challenge has been solved by including a quantitative history analysis and a “living” variance analysis to generate revised multi-year forecasts. Forecast5 did so. Essentially, Forecast5 customers will use their live-action against an initial schedule for a five-year prediction cycle.