The Ledger
Curated content foranalytical business leaders
Tag Archives: financial planning and analysis
FP&A Trends: Time to Make a Difference – Value Creation through FP&A Business Partnering
August 5, 2022
“We are model builders and, through our understanding, build various different scenarios to guide the business through to find the optimal outcome that creates maximum value.”
FP&A Trends: The Future of Business Modelling
July 25, 2022
“In most companies relying on Excel-based solutions, Excel is doing everything: it functions as the database, the calculation engine, and the analytical tool, sometimes all within one workbook. This approach is resource-intensive and eventually becomes unsustainable. And while Excel is an excellent tool for spreadsheets, financial modelling, and provides FP&A with much-needed agility, it’s not effective for sophisticated FP&A processes such as data consolidation, repetitive reporting processes, drill-downs, and comparison analysis (such as scenario comparisons). A technology solution is needed to unlock additional power.”
FP&A Trends: Advanced Analytics as an Attribute of FP&A Maturity
July 21, 2022
“We can mix and match and decide which initiatives will be executed in response to scenarios A, B or C…This is a quite technically demanding exercise and shouldn’t be performed in Excel or any other tool with manual data entry.”
FP&A Trends: Change Management and Analytical Change for FP&A
July 20, 2022
“The BARC survey “The Future of Planning, Sept 2021” clearly showed Rolling Forecast, Integration with Operational Processes, Simulations and Scenario Analysis, Action and Value driver-based planning are where organisations at going to invest in the future, with 56% planning to invest in technology in the next 12 months.”
FP&A Trends: How FP&A Evolved and Optimized Through the Pandemic
July 15, 2022
“Finance professionals are empowered to present data to cross teams on the best case, worst case, and most likely scenarios that could arise. This helps cross-teams understand how their decisions affect the rest of the organisation and make FP&A a strategic resource helping them navigate business objectives.”
CFO Magazine: Dynamic Financial Planning for Real Events, Not the Calendar
July 12, 2022
“With the risk of a recession rising, companies in most industries will have their financial planning processes severely tested over the coming months. They’d do well to replace a fixed annual exercise with a flexible approach that responds to changing conditions. Traditional planning methods have caused firms to be caught flat-footed by external shocks, and unable to quickly adapt or reallocate money and other resources.”
FP&A Trends: How an Integrated FP&A Can Drive Value Creation
July 1, 2022
“Three pillars of modern Integrated FP&A:
- Connected: Optimise planning capabilities by integrating planning techniques
- Complete: Build a cashflow mindset, stop focusing on local efficiencies
- Continuous: Focus on growth and value creation while moving at the speed”
FP&A Trends: Top Seven Lessons Learned from the Pandemic
July 1, 2022
“Being able to plan on request, being able to look at the different scenarios in real-time as and when they happened, what would be the outcome of those different scenarios, how do we then resource these different scenarios, what new KPI’s or Drivers have the pandemic thrown in the mix, how do we include that in our planning and decision making. Some organisations even changed their model completely. To do all of this, you need technology that is Agile.”
FP&A Trends: Tips and Hints On Implementing Driver-Based Models
June 28, 2022
“The first step in building a driver-based model is the decomposition of the business model. The easiest way would be to start with Income Statement (revenues and costs); however, we should not forget about the Balance Sheet and Cash Flow effects.”
