Very often financial and business planning professional ask the same question: which software do I need to improve my business and financial planning and analysis capabilities? The answer is not straightforward.

According to a 2017 IBM report, "Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. To put that into perspective, 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone." Those are some pretty staggering figures and businesses see the volume of their internally generated data growing all the time.

Even if last six years I have been specialized in Data management,  I still follow (thanks to FP&A club) developments in FP&A area. While reading some publications on FP&A trends I realized the strong connection between FP&A and Data management topics. 

A paradox which continues to puzzle me is how chief financial officers (CFOs) and controllers can be aware that their managerial accounting data is flawed and misleading, yet not take action to do anything about it.

Nowadays a lot of concerns in business environment are focused around data. There are several drivers for that, such as regulations (e.g. GDPR), the growing amount of data, new technologies in data processing and analysis etc.

As most forecasting methods require data, a forecaster analyzes the availability of data from both external and internal sources. The availability of external data is improving rapidly. With the explosion of Internet websites, potential sources of valuable data are becoming limitless. With unstructured data, the need for data mining tools has become a necessity for exploring potential sources of data for consumer analyses and predictive modelling purposes.