The Ledger

Curated content for
analytical business leaders

FP&A Trends: Financial Planning in the Age of Uncertainty

“Uncertainty can take many forms. It can manifest in a natural disaster, the merger or acquisition of a competitor, geopolitical changes, or a global pandemic. In fact, the current Covid-19 crisis has challenged the forecasting models used, especially when it comes to predicting the evolution of a company’s business in a highly uncertain environment.”

Read More at FP&A Trends>

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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CFO Journal: How to Act in the Face of Uncertainty

“Until recently, business leaders could assume that the immediate future would bear enough resemblance to the recent past that they could construct sturdy forecasts out of the data, assumptions, and real-world experience they’d been accumulating. Relying on continuity from past events, however, has always been a specious practice, especially in fast-moving industries, and can be existentially dangerous today.”

Read More at The Wall Street Journal >

CFO Magazine: 2022 Outlook: CFOs’ 4 Realms of Risk

“Corralling all the data required to get better at planning and forecasting and timely decision-making will not be a piece of cake. A Harvard Business Review Analytic Services study found that many finance teams struggle with accurately preparing, reconciling, and accessing high volumes of information; integrating recent or real-time data into analyses; and analyzing data, forming recommendations, and communicating them.”

Read More at CFO Magazine >