The FP&A Trends Webinar: Mastering Analytical Transformation with FP&A Trends Maturity Model
Click here to view details and register
The FP&A Trends Webinar: Mastering Analytical Transformation with FP&A Trends Maturity Model
Click here to view details and register
By Amrish Shah, CFO at Metabolic
The essence of the FP&A role is about helping to enhance the decision quality of the organisation. It measures this by reporting on, analysing and planning for the financial performance of the organisation. And it does this by partnering effectively with the business.
FP&A does tend to revolve around the following:
Increasingly technology solutions can be used to provide faster, deeper insights from these tasks. An example would be workflow solutions that support more timely posting of invoices thus allowing for an easier accruals process which in turn allows FP&A more confidence in the results and more time to analyse variances and consequences. Another example is the use of dynamic and powerful predictive models that can much easier spit out a baseline financial plan based on a larger quantity of business drivers.
This article focuses on HOW FP&A practitioners could approach their work.
I define 5 main phases that FP&A practitioners can use to approach their work.
Let’s look at each one in turn.
Within this one, we can define 3 more concrete steps
In this phase, the work begins.
This is where the real magic starts to happen and where critical thinking is required.
The report is now ready and has been stress tested. The real test is now to come with it being presented to the relevant audience who have the responsibility to do something with it. In general, the three things that are important from an FP&A perspective are:
Finally, from an end to end perspective there is the control phase where FP&A has an important role to monitor outcomes and help capture learning.
A key focus of FP&A Transformation is to move from a current situation where too much time is spent downstream to more time spent on upstream activities. For example, a typical journey could look as follows:
Adopting an end to end process and drastically reducing time on collecting phase to invest elsewhere.
In summary:
I hope this 5-stage approach gives some ideas for FP&A on how to approach not every single operational task but definitely those tasks that are of high impact for the business they are supporting. Technology is a great facilitator in most phases – for example, Artificial Intelligence in Information Phase, Data Analytics in Analysis Phase, Data Visualisation in Partnering Phase and Dashboards in Control phase.
Within any organisation you’ll find some groups of people who are the most well-known and highly...
This blog post looks at the ways of how FP&A can help entrepreneurs to accomplish their...
The corporate planning process is a controversial subject on which opinions differ widely. But experience has...
We will regularly update you on the latest trends and developments in FP&A. Take the opportunity to have articles written by finance thought leaders delivered directly to your inbox; watch compelling webinars; connect with like-minded professionals; and become a part of our global community.