FP&A Trends: Latest Trends and Challenges Facing FP&A Departments

“During the webinar, a conducted poll contained the following question: “What is the main barrier on your way to data-driven decision-making?” Most participants commented that their main difficulty was a deficiency in appropriate analytical tools. We can therefore conclude that planning continues to be executed traditionally.”

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CFO Insights: Finance 2025: Looking Ahead With the Benefit of Hindsight

“Does your company have a streamlined finance data infrastructure that can help you take advantage of advanced technologies and deliver insights? Finance data serves as a core foundational component of other accelerants, such as extracting an increasingly sophisticated level of business insights that can drive corporate strategy and are also relevant to stakeholders. This will require a comprehensive driver-based data architecture that tells the full back story and doesn’t just report on the outcomes without the underlying causes.”

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Harvard Business Review: 3 Strategic Options to Deal with Inflation

“Inflation in 2022 is a different story. Managers now enjoy a level of market visibility and agility that their predecessors could have hardly imagined even one generation ago. Managers have much better data and more sophisticated tools to analyze and turn this data into a useful information to support decisions. It’s an ideal time for them to treat inflation as a strategic opportunity rather than a tactical challenge, and to choose from a better set of options. Instead of worrying about how much more to charge their customers, they should devote their resources to figuring out how and why they should be charging them.”

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SF Magazine: Explanatory Data Visualizations

“Given the speed and volume of data collection in business, managers need ways to make sense of large sets of data to help inform decision making and to help communicate results. Data visualization is a powerful tool that can be used to both facilitate and influence decision making. The power of data visualization is in the ability to identify what might have otherwise gone undetected. It not only helps to make sense of large sets of data but can also help to uncover patterns or trends that might otherwise go undetected.”

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CFO Magazine: The ABCs of CPM Software

“While some CFOs are ahead of the curve in using CPM, most are not. They often see spreadsheets as the quickest and fastest way to stand up some level of CPM-related competencies. Unfortunately, that approach is usually not very successful.”

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SF Magazine: Forecasting the Future

5 ways to use predictive analytics:

1. Expand the data available
2. Tools: Start small and add on
3. Use scenario planning
4. Address the knowing-doing gap
5. Model building: Think causality

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CFO Magazine: A Small Business CFO’s Practical Approach to New Technologies

“Consider how data analytics and visualization tools are becoming more powerful and easy to use. Could you leverage data analytics and visualization tools to enhance finance and other departments’ storytelling abilities, enabling cross-functional partners to understand current realities and trends better and thus make better decisions?”

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CFO Dive: Forecasting Cash Flow Under Volatile Conditions

““I think it’s important to forecast cash flows by estimated revenue by product, by customer, by currency, and by breaking down operating costs between fixed and variable and other categories. If there are certain variables, like key input prices that could fluctuate dramatically, having a proper sensitivity analysis can help.””

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CFO Dive: Making FP&A More Business Relevant

“..The goal is simple: to arm CFOs with more relevant and actionable analyses so they can be better partners to the other executives.”

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