FP&A Trends

by Michael Coveney, co-author of "Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting in Uncertain Times"

Spreadsheets are without doubt the ‘killer’ application that turned the PC into an indispensable business tool. Before then, computing was the preserve of geeks and specialists who spoke in a language few accountants could understand as they served expensive, inaccessible machines locked away in their own air conditioned environment.

By Larysa Melnychuk, Managing Director at FP&A Trends group

Rolling Forecast can become the path leading to better company’s profitability and improved operating performance. This is a popular process in the FP&A world.  Many companies tackle the idea of taking it. 
Those companies that already implemented Rolling Forecast,  look at the ways of the process improvement. 

By Karl Kern, Founder/President, Kern Analytics LLC

One of the more important qualities of FP&A practitioners is curiosity.  Curiosity, a strong desire to know or learn something, is affected by the types of questions asked.  It is the types of questions that determine how much FP&A practitioners want to know or learn.

by Michael Coveney, co-author of "Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting in Uncertain Times"

There are only 3 things management can ever control:

• The arrangement of its own business processes (e.g. sales, production, customer service, etc.)
• The resources (money, people, assets) applied to those business processes, and
• The volume and quality of work carried out within those business processes

However, organisations operate in an uncontrollable and often unpredictable business environment, such as market demand, energy, inflation and exchange rates.   As a consequence, the role of planning is to help manage what can be controlled to produce outcomes that will achieve organisational objectives, within an uncontrollable and unknowable external environment.

By Irina Steenbeek, ABN AMRO Bank N.V. , Data management consultant

‘Let’s speak the same language’, was once said at the Amsterdam FP&A Board. Do you know what your FP&A Colleagues meant with this expression? And do you also find it challenging finding a common language within various departments of your company?
In this article I would like to tackle this issue and give you some tips on creating better and more efficient ways communication between different units within your company.