What one platform should give you
- One data layer. The ledger, the banks and the invoices loaded once, mapped once, used by both sides.
- A forecast that bridges the two. The budget becomes dated cash through collection and payment rules, and the cash forecast reconciles with the P&L and the balance sheet.
- Scenarios that show cash. A change in sales, margin or payment terms should show up in the cash position, not only in EBITDA.
- Covenants on the same numbers. Debt ratios computed from the statements, with an early warning from the forecast.
- One price and one login. No integration project between two vendors, and no data that is right in one tool and stale in the other.
When separate tools are still better
If you have a dedicated treasury team running payments, netting, an in-house bank or hedge accounting, an enterprise TMS built for those flows is the right core, and FP&A can sit beside it. If your FP&A process needs complex workforce or sales planning across thousands of users, a specialised planning suite may be worth its cost. One platform wins when the same small team owns both cash and plan.
Questions to ask any vendor
- Does the cash forecast use the same chart of accounts and entities as the statements, or a separate copy?
- When the budget changes, does the cash forecast change with it, and can I see why?
- Are forecasting and FP&A included, or sold as extra modules?
- How many entities and currencies are included in the price?
Where K-φ fits
K-φ has three workspaces on one engine. FP&A covers statements, consolidation, budgets with per-entity approval, a 10-lever scenario simulator, valuation and covenants. Cash covers bank feeds, invoices, the Cash worksheet and the cash forecast. Build lets you add your own rules and pages from Claude, Codex or Gemini CLI. It is one plan, $999 per month for the whole group, with unlimited entities and currencies and 10 seats, and a free trial on your own data.