Challenging market and rising costs put businesses into a non-stop race for efficiency and expense reduction. Cost management and identification of real expenditure sources in the production process are among the highest priorities for Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) and the entire finance department in almost every company.

The longer these types of primitive FP&A analysts and accountants delay implementing ABC, then the greater the risks. The issue here is not mainly about product and standard service-line costing to understand their profit margins. The issue is about the emerging need to report and analyse distribution channels and customer profitability.

Building an analytically led organisation, focused on bending the cost curve and reinvesting those savings into opportunities that are earlier on the product lifecycle are key steps to growing and sustaining shareholder value.  No company will continue to grow forever.  In order to stick around, you’ll need to one day start to bend the cost curve. 

Any crisis raises the question of whether costs can be truly fixed. What fixed costs can be reduced? There are several expense categories that should be investigated further when thinking about reducing costs.

Building a good FP&A team is essential to the success of the finance function and even for the whole organisation. In today’s business world, FP&A teams need to build a strong foundation before they can take advantage of the new technology trends.

Just to have some fun I will take the position that some accountants and FP&A specialists are primitive Homo Accounticus. In the evolutionary ladder they can become bean growers. They can add value beyond just reporting to assisting their organization to gain insights and make better decisions.