The Ledger
Curated content foranalytical business leaders
Tag Archives: financial planning and analysis
FP&A Trends: Intelligent FP&A: Top Three Challenges and How To Overcome Them
November 15, 2022
“Organisations fail to move past legacy ways of working. To this day, Excel remains the most common tool for running complex FP&A activities. Despite its popularity, spreadsheet-based planning is heavily constrained and unable to meet modern business needs and speed. It restricts collaboration, increases the risk of error, and often works in a silo and even when it is not, it can be time-consuming to integrate properly.”
CFO Dive: CFO FP&A Close-up: Modern Planning and Analysis
November 14, 2022
“The purpose of FP&A, at its core, is profitability. “You would be surprised how large companies can get and still not understand their profitability, and at the end of the day, this is the purpose of FP&A,” said Sheeran.”
FP&A Trends: Latest Trends and Challenges Facing FP&A Departments
October 14, 2022
“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.”
FP&A Trends: Drivers of Inflation in 2022, and How FP&A Can Prepare for It
October 14, 2022
“Whether or not you think you know which macroeconomic model is the right one for the global economy, you only need to know which one is the most relevant for your business. Each business lives in a different part of the overall supply chain, so some will be highly impacted by supply-side commodities prices or energy prices. In contrast, some will be impacted more significantly by the general purchasing power of currency reducing and have more relevant impacts from monetary policy.”
CFO Magazine: Budgeting vs. Forecasting: You Likely Need Both
October 11, 2022
“While a rigorous budget process shines a light on new initiatives and long-term goals, while also providing the guardrails for the coming year, sometimes facts on the ground change and you need to understand that and respond accordingly. If the changes are material, that response should include an accurate and sufficiently detailed forecast. Running a business is challenging. Attempting it with limited visibility will mute its successes and may even hasten its demise.”
FP&A Trends: Reinventing FP&A: FP&A Analysts
September 15, 2022
“In the past, all an analyst needed to know was Excel. But as data volumes increased and multidimensional technology evolved, analysts had new tools to analyse data from different perspectives, identify time-series trends, and set up alerts when values exceeded set parameters. As analytic technology matured, statistical techniques were embedded into applications that allowed simple forms of correlation which could then be used to build driver-based models to predict future events. All are still within the capabilities of the average accountant.”
FP&A Trends: FP&A Needs to Be More Prominent at the Executive Table than Ever
September 2, 2022
“Planning is an absolute business imperative, and organisations are striving to be more intelligent and agile in the world, where black swan events are becoming a new normal.
In order to achieve that, we need to get into a state where people and plans are completely aligned, but so far, people are planning in silos with spreadsheets and disconnected tools.”
FP&A Trends: Skills of the Future: How to Build Best-in-Class FP&A Teams
August 19, 2022
“The Architect: is responsible for building the bridges between raw data, key business drivers, and driver-based models into actionable insights that help make business decisions.”
