Financial models are crucial to the business but building them in Excel can be both complicated and frustrating. Setting up formulas and stipulating conditions takes time. And just when you think your model is water-tight, there is another error.

This series of articles focuses on blowing up this stereotype by demonstrating how Finance in general and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) in particular can change its language, use the right part of the brain to throw light on the most important business drivers, revive figures and make them tell a story that is easy to perceive and take action on. 

This article applies to all private sector firms, not just Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) and Private Equity (PE) firms. The technique described here can also be used to rank the profitability of five financial planning alternatives to the traditional budget.

As long as there are humans involved in making a forecast, the forecast will be biased. But there are some steps to make a forecast unbiased. This article will look into the unbiased forecasting framework and will explore the methods where humans have minimal influence on the outcome.

FP&A departments are able to track and manage financial plans. But can FP&A help manage the execution of a strategic plan? Is there value in integrating these two processes?

This article is about a basic understanding of main value creation concepts and how those impact the work of FP&A. We take a look at value creation from a financial lens – the DuPont analysis framework for calculating return on investment (ROI).