Usually I am fairly rational and do not let my personal emotions interfere with how I interact with others. However, as the readers of my blogs and articles may have detected, my more recent writings increasingly reflect my frustrations with old school accountants.

We’ve all come across checkpoints in our personal lives where we commonly think about or use phrases such as “let’s take a few steps back”, “I need to reset things” and “let’s start all over again”.

P&L management focuses on the items included into P&L (profit and loss) report. It has become an increasingly popular technique used by the top managers around the world. P&L responsibility scope goes far beyond being simply responsible for profits or loss. Managers must not only understand what stands behind and drives each item of the report, but also need to take steps to improve P&L statements.

The Controllership and FP&A are two separate components of the organisation. This article will highlight a couple of differences between the two.

The Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) function has become more prominent in the decision making process in most large organizations because of the emergence of BIG DATA (large volumes of unstructured and structured data). Today, most companies have access to vast amounts of data (financial and operational) and must figure out how to use it to drive growth and profitability.

Cost Accounting provides insight into the relationship between financial sacrifices and financial benefits. There are a number of elements within this discipline that support this relationship. FP&A stimulates thinking about activities that create sacrifices in order to create benefits. These activities develop a framework for understanding what organizations are doing and where they are going.  The question is: which element of Cost Accounting develops a meaningful framework that links activities to understanding?