Monthly Customer News Update – June
Planning can no longer wait for perfect conditions.
This June edition brings together practical insights, customer stories, and thought leadership around one important shift: moving from static planning cycles to more continuous, connected, and decision-ready planning.
So here is the simple version 👇
1. Help shape the future of Board
You are already working with more signals, more pressure, and faster decisions.
That means your experience matters.
What is working well?
Where are the friction points?
What would help your teams plan, analyze, and act with more confidence?
Your feedback directly influences how Board evolves and where future focus goes next.
👉 Take the survey here:
https://community.board.com/home/leaving?allowTrusted=1&target=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.surveymonkey.com%2Fr%2FHPC59H6
Why this matters: product direction is strongest when it is shaped by the people using Board every day.
2. EU Economic Outlook: Mid-Year Review 2026
Europe’s economy is still growing, but the planning environment has become more complex.
Inflation pressures are returning.
Financing conditions are shifting.
Businesses are facing uncertainty around trade, energy, and fiscal policy.
In the latest Board Economic Outlook, economist María Marcos explores the key trends shaping the second half of 2026 and what they mean for business planning, investment, and decision-making.
🎥 Watch the video:
https://www.board.com/video/eu-economic-outlook-mid-year-review-2026
3. Continuous Planning: making confident decisions in real time
Traditional planning was built for a slower world.
Annual plans.
Quarterly forecasts.
Disconnected processes.
Decisions based on assumptions that may already be outdated by the time the plan is approved.
Today, that model is under pressure.
Modern organizations are moving toward Continuous Planning: an always-on approach where plans and forecasts adjust as internal and external signals change.
Traditional Planning vs. Continuous Planning
Traditional Planning
- Periodic and static
- Based mainly on historical data
- Often disconnected across functions
- Slow to adapt when conditions change
Continuous Planning
- Real-time and dynamic
- Driven by live data and external signals
- Integrated across finance, operations, and strategy
- Built to respond quickly to change
And with Board Agents, persona-based AI agents can support planners and decision-makers by helping interpret changes, analyze drivers, evaluate scenarios, and recommend actions in context.
The goal is not to replace human decision-making.
The goal is to help teams act faster, with better context and more confidence.
4. Why customer sentiment now requires Continuous Planning
Customer behavior is changing faster than many planning cycles can react.
This is especially clear in retail, where demand is not disappearing, but becoming more selective, more volatile, and more uneven.
Customers are buying differently.
They are more value-conscious.
Their preferences shift before those shifts appear clearly in sales data.
That is why customer sentiment matters.
Search behavior, product engagement, reviews, social signals, and basket composition can all provide early indicators of where demand is heading.
But here is the important contrast:
Customer insight is not enough.
The real value comes when insight becomes action.
From insight to action
Many organizations already collect customer sentiment data. But too often, it stays in dashboards or post-event analysis.
The shift now is from:
“What are customers saying?”
to:
“What should we do about it now?”
That changes the role of planning.
It means customer signals should influence forecasting, assortment, inventory, margin decisions, and financial outcomes in real time.
The key message is simple:
If plans cannot adapt as fast as customers do, they are already out of date.
5. Customer story: Exponential-e moves from spreadsheet-based lease accounting to automated IFRS 16 compliance
Exponential-e faced growing IFRS 16 complexity and an expanding lease portfolio.
Previously, the finance team relied on spreadsheets and manual processes. Lease data was fragmented, calculations were time-consuming, and version control created risk around accuracy and auditability.
By implementing Board Lease Accounting, Exponential-e centralized and automated the process.
Key outcomes
- 85% reduction in manual lease accounting effort
- Lease reporting accelerated from weeks to days
- Reduced spreadsheet dependency
- Improved compliance accuracy
- Stronger audit readiness
- Greater transparency across balance sheet, profit and loss, and cash flow
Why this story matters: Exponential-e shows how regulatory complexity can become an opportunity to improve control, efficiency, and financial confidence.
Instead of treating IFRS 16 as only a compliance burden, the company turned lease accounting into a more scalable, automated, and insight-driven process.
As Andrew Morris, Group Finance Director at Exponential-e, shared:
“Lease accounting is now a controlled, efficient process. It is transforming regulatory compliance into a source of confidence and strategic insight.”
6. Customer story: DFE Pharma unifies financial planning across the globe
As DFE Pharma’s business became more complex, spreadsheet-based planning could no longer keep pace.
The company needed to manage hundreds of SKUs, thousands of customers, multiple ERP systems, global stakeholders, and more forward-looking planning requirements.
Excel had reached its limits.
By implementing Board, DFE Pharma brought budgeting, rolling forecasting, reporting, and scenario analysis into one unified planning platform.
Key outcomes
- Budget throughput time shortened by 50%
- Monthly rolling 18-month financial forecasting enabled
- Forecasting, budgeting, and reporting unified in one environment
- Operational data connected directly into financial planning
- Manual reconciliation reduced
- Scenario analysis and driver-based simulations enabled
- Finance and business users gained more self-service capability
A key lesson from this story:
Spreadsheets may support growth for a while, but they do not scale well with increasing data volume, multiple systems, complex stakeholder input, and the need for fast scenario analysis.
7. Community story: Automating daily sales visibility with Board’s Send To feature
Karry Schupp, Senior Financial Analyst at DH Pace Company and Community Captain, shared a practical example of how a small automation improvement can make a big difference.
During an ERP transition, DH Pace needed to bridge data from both legacy and new systems. Board helped consolidate that information into one reporting view, reducing the need for users to pull data from multiple systems and perform manual Excel analysis.
One manager needed a daily consolidated view of sales across departments. Instead of asking the user to manually access a report each day, the team created a custom presentation and used Board’s Send To feature to automate daily email delivery.
Why this is useful
The Send To feature allows users to automatically send a Board presentation to one or multiple users by email, with configurable recipient lists, scheduling options, email text, and attachment formats such as PDF, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
Key benefits
- Daily sales visibility without manual distribution
- Consistent delivery at the same time each day
- Reduced follow-up and reporting friction
- Easy sharing with users who may not access Board directly
- Automatic historical record through delivered emails
The common thread across this month’s stories
Across all of these updates, one pattern is clear:
Organizations are moving away from slow, disconnected, spreadsheet-heavy processes and toward planning models that are more connected, automated, and continuous.
The contrast is easy to see:
From static plans
to living planning models
From manual spreadsheets
to governed automation
From delayed reporting
to timely visibility
From disconnected teams
to cross-functional alignment
From insight after the fact
to decisions in real time
That is what Continuous Planning is really about.
It is not just planning more often.
It is planning in a way that reflects how fast the business, customers, and markets are changing.
Your turn 💬
Which part of this month’s update is most relevant for your organization right now?
Are you focused on:
- Reducing spreadsheet dependency?
- Improving forecast accuracy?
- Connecting finance and operations?
- Automating reporting?
- Bringing customer signals into planning?
- Building a more continuous planning model?
Share your thoughts in the comments. We would love to hear what you are working on and what challenges you are solving.
Thanks, and see you in the Hub!
