This Financial Planning Software Provides Predictive Analytics and Gen AI for Finance Teams

TL; DR: Calling all financial teams and professionals! Does planning for the future and managing financial and operational performance often feel too much like a guessing game? Well, it doesn’t have to be. Jedox offers financial planning software that empowers you to plan the future with confidence. The platform uses a variety of technologies and solutions to help users forecast, budget, and plan strategically. Join 2,900-plus organizations, including McDonald’s, Tony’s Chocolonely, Henkell & Freixenet, and Deutsche Telekom, as they transform their enterprise performance management with Jedox.

Imagine that you had the gift of clairvoyance or foresight. How would you approach life differently? Would you try to alter your future to get what you want or accept fate as it is?

We all know how it feels to have hindsight in situations. I know I’ve kicked myself in the past for doing something that I could’ve prevented if I’d just had a different perspective. But unless you have an unusual sixth sense, you probably just have to learn from your mistakes like the rest of us.

Although there’s no way to truly know what lies ahead, the business world has found a pretty good alternative to plan the future — predictive analytics. This is a process that uses historical and current data to predict future outcomes and trends so businesses can make better decisions to align with that future.

Of course, it wouldn’t be like AI to take forecasting and predictive analytics to a whole new level. Integrating machine learning has allowed companies to forecast trends and behaviors with even more accuracy. We can see this with the financial planning software, Jedox.

“Jedox is a software platform that allows businesses to use internal data to understand how they run their business, how to plan their business, how to forecast their business, how to budget it, and ultimately how to manage performance,” said Eren Koont, VP of Solutions Marketing at Jedox.

Jedox leverages a combination of technologies and solutions, including Gen AI and machine learning, to help financial teams uncover insights, forecast revenue, build models, and create strategic plans for the future.

Its adaptable and unified platform has enabled thousands of organizations, including Mercedes-Benz and the Finnish Red Cross, to exceed expectations and simplify their financial processes with automation. So how does Jedox work? I’ll answer that below.

Jedox boasts a customer base of over 2,900 organizations in more than 140 countries. It has become an established leader in the financial planning space. One of its most notable achievements took place in 2023 when the Gartner Magic Quadrant named it a leader in financial planning software. As it happens, it recently received this recognition again in 2024.

The company is currently on a continued growth journey. “We are a growth-stage VC-backed scaleup. We’re continuing growth across all regions, North America, Europe, Asia,” said Eren.

It’s no surprise that Jedox earned a 100% user satisfaction rating and a 93% user recommendation rate, according to BARC’s 2023 Planning Survey. Its comprehensive platform adapts to user needs and allows teams to plan, forecast, and budget for the future effortlessly.

“I’d say the big differentiator that our customers tell us is the inherent adaptability of our platform to be able to model any kind of scenario, as well as integrate any data source to our system through Jedox Integrator, which is basically a no-code ETL offering designed for financial analysts to effectively manage their vast sums of data,” said Eren.

Jedox simplifies financial planning, analysis, and reporting, empowering teams to outperform their expectations. Your business can run unlimited simulations, plan in real time in ever-changing markets, and harness data to inform decisions and predictions.

“Our software helps you understand what’s going well, what needs improvement. You can do any kind of scenario planning and analysis, so leaders can make decisions on where they want to take the business,” said Eren.

Another attribute of its platform is Excel similarity. “Our system emulates Excel in a lot of ways. We also have an Add-in for Excel so that people can work in their most comfortable environment, but also contribute to the single source truth planning database,” said Eren.

In the era of data analytics, businesses are harnessing data to make better decisions across every department. Data allows teams to operate more efficiently by cutting costs and time spent.

With roots in Germany and offices across the world, Jedox calls the use of its platform “superplännen.” Using Jedox allows you to go beyond traditional financial planning and transform business processes. Your business can integrate data from any source and use it to make decisions confidently and improve performance across teams.

“Our customers are taking all of their business data: demand data, sales data, and external data like foot traffic in front of retail shops to understand how to model their business,” said Eren.

Teams can use Jedox’s unique modeling capabilities to build scenarios and prepare for the future. Jedox empowers businesses to leverage the full potential of their data and extract valuable insights for strategic planning.

You can use Jedox to identify patterns for predictions, forecast demand, and roll out new products based on data, among other use cases.

Jedox also provides different types of charts within its platform for data visualization. You can visualize data in tabular or Excel format and create drag-and-drop dashboards that include dynamic KPI cards, which allow you to monitor your KPIs in real time.

You can also export data from Jedox to other business systems. Jedox will structure the data and send it to another business intelligence tool, such as Power BI, for reporting or other needs.

“So Jedox is taking that data, turning it into something useful for the business user. And then you can either visualize the data internally and make decisions with it or export it to other parts of your finance tech stack,” said Eren.

Many companies have adopted and integrated AI into their operations. While most companies have recently jumped on the AI bandwagon, Jedox had found use in the technology way before the ChatGPT craze.

“AI is nothing new to Jedox. Actually, back in 2019, we introduced the first Jedox AI-assisted capabilities, which were wizard-based AI machine learning processes to understand data, clean data, and make predictions on that data,” said Eren.

These capabilities enabled finance professionals to incorporate AI into the workflows without needing to have a data science or machine learning background. Eren told us that Jedox customers have used AI to adopt predictive forecasting techniques, including predicting customer churn and forecasting sales with greater accuracy.

For example, Mitsui Chemicals Europe used Jedox’s machine learning capabilities to run its sales forecasting and achieved 95% accuracy on the forecast. This is just one of many Jedox success stories.

The Jedox team also recently introduced new generative AI capabilities to its system. The generative AI enables teams to summarize complex financial information, create drafts for communications to internal and external stakeholders, and make queries about their data.

“Businesses can use natural language processing to make queries of the database, produce views of the data based on just asking a question, and get a report from the database without having to understand how to build those queries using the Jedox UI,” said Eren.

What’s Ahead: Autonomous Finance

The Jedox platform is nothing short of innovative. Eren told us the Jedox team’s roadmap is influenced by various things, including customer feedback.

“I would say that the big input is from our customer base. We have more than 2,900 customers around the world. We have local events and customer roundtables where people contribute and help us stack rank features to add to the roadmap,” said Eren.

Jedox plans to deliver a lot more unique solutions in the future. One of those is to respond to the trend toward autonomous finance and digital transformation that is occurring around the globe. Capabilities supporting hyperautomation of parts of the financial planning process will free up time for professionals to become digital business partners and make confident decisions with their data.

“We’re working on a set of features that enable finance leaders and finance teams to own the plan and be that digital business partner for the rest of their organization,” said Eren.

He also said other features will play a role in helping users establish themselves as digital partners. “You’ll see that with Gen AI and the interactivity with Excel, all of those kinds of capabilities allow business leaders to work in environments comfortable to them. We’re excited about contributing to this vision of digital business partnering,” said Eren.