In this series of blogs, Michael is looking at a number of areas that FP&A departments must address if they are to add value to the organisations they serve in this technology-driven age. In this blog, he looks at the reports being produced.

The promise of global dashboards is simplicity — one version of the truth. But truth without context can quickly become noise. Local teams operate in different realities, with different pressures, and one rigid view often fails to serve them.

“Telling the story” is one of the most important parts of the FP&A role, and data visualisation can help immensely. This makes the FP&A dashboard a very powerful tool, but 80% of dashboards are seldom or never used.

Increasingly, FP&A’s most valued skill is turning data/facts into a story and putting these into context. However, there is generally too little focus on the actual art and science of storytelling, the primary tool in business partnering. This article on Storytelling will evolve around the three core elements of a good story – the narrative, visuals and data and cover how combining these allows FP&A to fulfil our goal in life of influencing change.

What is your data literacy level? Everybody agrees data visualisation is powerful. This article will guide you through the most common and not-so-obvious data visualisation mistakes.

Every FP&A professional has an active role to play in business partnering, supporting the leadership team to aid decision making. To enable this, the FP&A team must be positioned to inform the future impact of decisions that are being made now. This requires understanding what the company’s strategy is, where the company is heading, what part your business unit/function play to get there and what are the KPIs on which they are being measured.