Our new Progress Calculator is designed to help you get the best from the Future-Fit Business Benchmark, by providing a straightforward way to measure progress towards all 23 Break-Even Goals.
The Progress Calculator takes the form of three Excel workbooks:
- Future-Fit Progress Calculator – Main which calculates future-fitness for all but two of the Break-Even Goals.
- Future-Fit Progress Calculator – BE04 Procurement which calculates future-fitness for goal BE04: Procurement safeguards the pursuit of future-fitness.
- Future-Fit Progress Calculator – BE23 Financial assets which calculates future-fitness for goal BE23: Financial assets safeguard the pursuit of future-fitness.
These three workbooks enable you to see exactly how progress is calculated for each goal, identify and input the requisite data, and then visualize the results in summary ‘score card’ form.
How to use it
There are several ways in which the Progress Calculator can help you to get the best from the Benchmark:
Build your understanding of the Benchmark
The Excel workbooks translate the detailed guidance from the Break-Even Goal Action Guides into an easy-to-use form – so you can explore exactly how progress is assessed for each goal, and play with live examples for yourself.
Measure and manage progress toward future-fitness
Some small and medium-size enterprises – where only one or two people may be responsible for gathering data from across the business – may find that the Progress Calculator is the only tool they need to track their extra-financial performance on an ongoing basis.
Larger companies will likely require a more scalable data management system – and we’re working on that, so stay tuned – but in the meantime the Progress Calculator offers a great way to get started.
Identify data gaps and potential business risks
For each Break-Even Goal, the Progress Calculator makes clear what data inputs are required, and enables you to exclude particular areas of the business if insufficient information is available.
The summary view highlights where partial information has been used, so it is easy to identify data gaps that are preventing a comprehensive assessment of performance. This is important because such gaps may present risks to the business. For example, not being able to calculate future-fitness with respect to water use at a particular facility may indicate that the company doesn’t know if it is vulnerable to water stress in that region.
Bring Future-Fit considerations into key business decisions
Once data has been gathered and input, a ‘snapshot’ of the Progress Calculator can be saved and altered to ask “what if?” questions. For example, “what will be the change to our renewable energy performance if we switch production from factory A to factory B?” or “how could our performance change across multiple goals if we substitute raw material X for Y?”
This ability to quickly compare alternatives mirrors how a business typically weighs up the financial implications of each project, so it can help you to bring extra-financial considerations into the core of your business planning process.
Where to find it
The Progress Calculator can be downloaded from the Resources page on our website. As with our core Benchmark documents, this tool is published under a Creative Commons license and is completely free to use and modify.
We’d love to hear what you think of this tool, so if you have any questions or ideas for improvement please drop us a line at info@futurefitbusiness.org.
