In this article, we will stay with the price and look at another example how it could be successfully controlled. Price management is a very sensitive and complicated topic touching multiple business aspects including ethics.

The increasing levels of business partnering and integration, new opportunities in functions outside finance are becoming possible. Having personally witnessed some successful cross-functional movements by FP&A professionals, I am a strong believer in the capability as well as the value of such movements. 

Explaining and forecasting activity evolutions require to isolate correctly different factors (variables) that have an impact such as quantity, price, customer win/loss, competition. In the international environment, currencies and currency variances are one of the important variables.

Is FP&A a generalist or a specialist? I believe it can be a mixture of both.

New technologies are reducing back-office workload, giving FP&A the opportunity to be more involved in running the business. Degree of this involvement depends on the capacity of FP&A team and the organisational culture. 

Many Finance professionals have an incorrect perception of the word “insight”, but here is a simple way to validate if you provide insight or “just” data. Ask yourself, what decision a business can make based on the data you have provided? Insight is something valuable and not yet known by the business, but when known, the business uses it to make decisions that are data-driven.