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Ibisco Finplan2009 Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Ibisco Finplan?

Ibisco Finplan is financial software designed for a wide range of applications in the area of corporate finance. The main features of Finplan are: financial performance analysis, financial planning (budgeting), capital budgeting, corporate valuation and reporting.

2. Who are Finplan users?

Finplan users are financial professionals in companies, consultancies and financial institutions. For their decision making they need software, which is reliable, easy to use, covers a broad area of applications, needs a short period of time to be operational and can be connected to the existing operating financial software.

3. What is a typical use of Finplan for companies?

Companies use Finplan for:

  • Financial analysis, planning, controlling, rating analysis, capital budgeting.

  • Internal and external reporting.

  • Analysis of business partners.

  • Analysis and benchmarking of competitors.

  • Analysis, valuation and simulation of potential acquisitions.

4. What is a typical use of Finplan for a consultant?

Consultants use Finplan to advise their clients on:

  • Financial analysis, rating analysis, planning, controlling.

  • Benchmarking.

  • Financial restructuring.

  • Capital budgeting.

  • Analysis, valuation and simulation of potential acquisitions.

5. What is a typical use of Finplan for financial institutions?

Financial institutions use Finplan for:

  • Rating analysis of corporate customers.

  • Corporate finance advisory work.

  • Management of principal investments.

  • Portfolio management.

6. How is Finplan built?

Finplan is built in Microsoft® Excel and Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Applications.

7. What kind of support do Finplan users get from Ibisco or its Partners?

The support level depends on the maintenance agreement that Finplan users purchase either together with Finplan or separately. The general rule is that Finplan users contacts Ibisco partners from whom they bought the software. Ibisco partners have the ability to offer Remote support, which means that they can connect to the user's PC and in this way quickly and efficiently solve potential issues that may arise during the use of Finplan.

8. Which financial tables are included in Finplan?

Financial tables in Finplan are divided into five sections: financial statements, financial analysis, planning, valuation, and currency rates.
Financial statements: Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow Statement, Statement of Changes in Equity.
Financial analysis: Financial Highlights, Selected Financial Data, Financial Ratios, Basel II Rating Analysis, Return on Invested Capital, Cost of capital, Additional Data.
Planning: Income Statement Forecast Variables, Balance Sheet Forecast Variables.
Valuation: Valuation Cash Flow, Valuation Data, DCF Valuation Summary, Valuation Summary.
Capital budgeting: Valuation Cash Flow, Data, Summary.
Currency rates: Currency and Inflation rates.

9. Which accounting standards are used in Finplan?

Finplan2009 is based on International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). We can chose between two types of Income Statements where the operating expenses are split either by function or by type. In this way, Finplan can be used by all companies using International Financial Reporting Standards.

10. Which languages are offered in Finplan?

In all markets where Finplan is sold, it is offered in the local as well as in English language.

11. What kind of graphical support is offered in Finplan?

Finplan offers extensive visual presentation of the financial tables in the form of predefined charts, custom charts, waterfall charts, and tree-charts.
With the custom charts, we can show any item or a combination of Finplan items. We can also save up to 10 trend charts and 10 pie charts for selected items.
Finplan offers eight predefined chart groups with each having four charts.
The waterfall charts offer the easiest and quickest way to visualize the absolute and relative changes of the most important business items: Net profit, Operating profit, Total assets, and Total liabilities.
We can choose between four types of tree-charts: Du Pont, Economic profit, Basel II rating analysis, DCF valuation.

12. What kind of time series can be set in Finplan?

We can select any combination of periods as long we have continuous periods from past to future. Possible periods range from 1 month, 2 months, quarter, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 months, and a year.

13. Can we set the business year that does not end on 31st of December?

The business year-end can be set at the end of any given month.

14. Are the balance sheet and the income statement interconnected?

The balance sheet and the income statement are interconnected when planning future performance of various items, such as depreciation and amortization – fixed assets, interest paid – borrowings, interest received – investments, etc.
Finplan offers two ways of balancing the balance sheet:

  • With Short-term bank deposits on the assets side of the balance sheet.

  • With Short-term bank borrowings on the liabilities side of the balance sheet.

15. Can we perform analysis or planning of multiple companies/scenarios simultaneously?

In Finplan, we can simultaneously work with four different projects (companies/scenarios). In addition, we can sum these projects together, calculate their average, or show the ratio of one project to another.

16. Does Finplan include any variance columns, like change to previous period or change to equivalent period in previous year?

Finplan enables us to use 14 different variance columns: Change to previous period, Change year-on-year, % structure of financial statements, Actual/Plan, Cumulative data, Change of cumulative, etc. The variances can be presented either in percentage terms or as absolute values.

17. How many variance columns can be shown at once?

Finplan enables us to use 14 different variance columns but we can use three at once, for example: Change to previous period, Change year-on-year, % structure.

18. Can we perform currency conversion in Finplan?

We can convert the figures from the base currency to other currencies based on the rates which we enter in the Currency and Inflation Rates table. We can define separate rates for the income statement conversion and separate rates for the balance sheet conversion. We can also change the base currency which is automatically set when Finplan is installed based on the regional settings of the PC.

19. What kind of currency units can we have in Finplan?

We can have the figures in actual units, in thousands or in millions of the selected currency.

20. Can we perform rating analysis in Finplan?

Finplan includes the Rating Analysis table and a corresponding tree-chart. The purpose of the Basel II Rating Analysis in Finplan is to determine an approximate rating of companies using analysis of historic and forecast financial performance. The rating is based on six predefined financial ratios, which are calculated for each period separately. Based on the value of the ratio, its rating is calculated on the scale from one to five. It is especially interesting to produce a rating score under different forecast scenarios.

21. How can we perform capital budgeting in Finplan?

Capital budgeting in Finplan is based on discounting of future cash flows that a project is expected to generate. It contains three main elements:

  • Forecasting future performance through financial statements for each forecast period separately. This is the so called explicit part of valuation.

  • Determining the salvage value of the project at the end of the last forecast period (end of the project).

  • Estimating the cost of capital (WACC), used for discounting the future cash flows to the present value.

The results of the capital budgeting analysis are: Project net present value, Cumulative free cash flow, Internal rate of return (IRR), Modified internal rate of return (MIRR) and Payback period.

22. Which methods are used for performing company valuation in Finplan?

In Finplan, company valuation is based on two different methods. The first method is discounting of free cash flows (DCF), which a company or a project is expected to generate in the future. The second method is valuation by multiples where we can value the company based on four different price multiples of comparable companies: P/book, P/E, EV/EBITDA, and EV/Sales.
The DCF Valuation contains three main elements:

  • Forecasting future performance through financial statements for each forecast period separately. This is the so called explicit part of valuation.

  • Determining the continuing value which represents the value beyond the explicit part of the forecast.

  • Estimating the cost of capital, used for discounting future cash flows to the present value.

23. Can we import data from general ledger or other financial databases to Finplan?

Implementation of a data transfer from general ledgers or other external databases to Finplan can be accomplished quite quickly, usually within an hour. We can produce an unlimited number of data transfer links to different databases in different currencies. We can import actual as well as plan data.
The first step in connecting Finplan to the external data sources is to export the data from the external databases to the prescribed format in the Microsoft Excel data file. This file includes two sets of data for each period: account numbers and balances on these accounts. The second step is allocation of the accounts from the data file to the corresponding Finplan items in the so-called Link Table in Finplan. To import the data, we just select the data file, which we want to import.

24. What kind of reporting is available in Finplan?

Finplan has a very powerful and easy to use report engine. We can prepare reports in Microsoft® Word or in Microsoft® PowerPoint®. The report content can be customised to include any combination and order of the tables and the charts that we choose to have. The reports are nicely organised, with all the tables of the same width, and with automatic page breaks. In addition to reporting in Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint, we can also export the data to Microsoft Excel.

25. Can we change the colours of the tables? What other customised formatting is available?

Finplan has six predefined table styles. In addition, Finplan enables customised settings of colours, fonts, font sizes, column widths, and row heights.

26. Can we hide rows and columns?

The items that include sub items can be hidden or shown by double-clicking on them. We can also hide and unhide rows or columns.

27. Can we build our own financial model in Finplan?

Finplan includes three tables called Additional data, where each of the tables has 150 empty rows. These tables are used for developing our own models, including formulas, number formats and other settings. In other tables, we can rename most of the items and customise their formulas. We can link different tables with formulas where it is reasonable to do so. We can also rename the tables’ titles.

28. Can we write comments in Finplan?

We can add comments to each Finplan item. The item that is commented has a star (*) sign on the left side in front of its name. If we choose so, we can include the comments in the Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint reports.