The Ledger
Curated content foranalytical business leaders
Tag Archives: financial planning
SF Magazine: The CFO Playbook
October 19, 2021
“Many CFOs are hesitant to shift business models because of the negative impact on short-term revenue. To calm this fear, finance teams should use scenario modeling and financial planning tools to analyze the potential cost of the immediate shift vs. the revenue potential over time. By modeling different scenarios, offerings, and market conditions, company leadership can see what investments make the most financial sense and have the highest potential for continuous revenue growth.”
CFO Dive: Driver-Based Budgeting Touted for Integrating Financial and Operational Planning
August 25, 2021
“Driver-based budgeting links real resources and activities to your budget, and most FP&A organizations are striving to achieve that. From my perspective, it really acknowledges that the budget is the articulation of a series of operational items or activities. It’s different from traditional budgeting in that it shifts the focus to outcomes, and that’s ultimately how you drive your annual budget.”
Accounting Today: Now What? Bridge the Gap in Financial Planning and Analysis
July 22, 2021
“Transformation is no longer just “nice to have.” Business leaders must be able to rely on the validity, trustworthiness and relevance of the data used to analyze and report on end-to-end planning, budgeting and forecasting processes. The cost of continuing business as usual is duplication of the efforts, fragmented systems that take lots of people and time to reconcile, challenges to meeting regulatory compliance, an inability to determine where to prioritize resources, and lower stakeholder confidence.”
CFO Dive: Making FP&A More Business Relevant
July 22, 2021
“..The goal is simple: to arm CFOs with more relevant and actionable analyses so they can be better partners to the other executives.”
SF Magazine: Budgeting Revisited
May 3, 2021
6 things to consider when innovating your budget:
1. Corporate Culture
2. Comprehensive Approach
3. Strategy & Scenario Planning
4. Relative Target Setting
5. Compensation System
6. Flexible Planning
CFO Dive: Large gulf between CFOs and reality on real-time capabilities, survey finds
January 7, 2021
“Almost 45% of CFOs say they plan to have nearly all of their finance processes and operations in real-time over the next three years; 34% say their goal is to do real-time scenario planning, and 24% say the ability to provide real-time insights is the highest priority of their finance function.
“By embracing change and pivoting to intelligent operations, the role of the finance function is increasingly elevated while positioning the company for growth,” Manoj Shroff, head of Accenture’s intelligent finance operations offering, said.”
CFO Journal: Medtronic CFO: The Role of Finance in Crisis Response
November 8, 2020
Finance plays a crucial role. Along with the CEO and our business unit leaders, our global finance organization is a strategic partner in developing and ensuring strong execution against our longer-term strategy. Strategy needs to be tied closely to investments, financial planning, and forecasting, so our finance teams have a natural connection to strategic planning and execution.
SF Magazine: Change Your Approach to Finance Strategy
November 6, 2020
“We used to spend a lot of time analyzing historical data to inform business planning; we’ve now switched to a predictive approach to financial planning, looking at a wider range of key indicators such as sales pipeline data. This allows finance professionals to help senior management project what’s likely to happen and make better decisions through the use of real-time data.”
FP&A Trends: Let Traditional Budgeting be a Victim of this Pandemic
October 28, 2020
“Instead of annual forecasts of things that cannot be predicted or controlled, with December 31 as the fictitious deadline, companies should monitor the reality on a regular basis and work more with trend analyses and unbiased (mathematical) forecasts.”
