The Ledger
Curated content foranalytical business leaders
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 Journal: CFOs Target FP&A, Analytics for Improvement
April 26, 2021
“Among core finance functions, 63% of CFOs cited FP&A as the one they would most like to improve. Perhaps because of the increased demand on FP&A teams during the pandemic—from providing robust scenario modeling to monitoring and maximizing key priorities such as cash flow and liquidity—CFOs may have gained a clearer vision of how they’d like to reinvent FP&A.”
CFO Magazine: Can Excel Survive?
April 20, 2021
“But old dogs can’t always learn new tricks. While Excel has shown remarkable staying power, some experts believe it may now be challenged beyond its reach. Companies big and small increasingly need to automatically pull their financial data from multiple cloud-based systems and utilize more advanced data analytics. Excel may be a roadblock to that…While Excel is often used as a collection point for data from other systems, it is still a “manual and largely siloed vehicle”…Excel’s limited ability to handle massive data sets “can lead to long processing times and more steps than other database tools.””
CFO Journal: For Controllers, a New Agenda: Delivering More Value
April 16, 2021
“Controllers, as independent observers, are in an ideal position to bring more structure and discipline to decision-making processes, ensuring value is realized from capital allocation. They can review the efficacy of past business decisions that relied on assumptions that may no longer be valid and help develop a disciplined, yet agile, process for adjusting future capital allocations. Ensuring there is an evaluation and feedback loop for decisions in the event conditions or facts have changed, as well as a process for course-correcting, falls squarely in the controller’s domain. In fact, this responsibility is one the controllership should own as an unbiased, independent arbitrator of the decision-making process in the organization.”
