At the fifth Committee meeting, Kevin McConnell, Intelligent Technologies Solution Strategy at SAP, shared an interesting presentation about using Machine Learning for better results in FP&A. In the video, Kevin talks about the evolution of Machine Learning and how machine learning automation works.

This article focuses on how to ensure that your team adopts business partnering because long-term it is not feasible to maintain quality of the work if you are trying to do it all by yourself. And quality is what makes partnering stick.

Businesses exist in order to improve the well-being of others. One approach businesses use for achieving this goal is the concept of people/process/technology. In businesses the element of technology is the responsibility of information technology (IT) departments; information technology is responsible for the acquisition, maintenance, and enhancement of technology. How can information technology improve its ability to acquire, maintain, and enhance technology? An answer is financial planning, thinking about how businesses can accumulate wealth.

Among FP&A challenges understanding, explaining and forecasting revenues evolutions are one of the top items. It may be more or less difficult depending on the company business.

Budgeting no longer helps organisations to perform better. On the contrary. It prevents organisations from performing to their full potential, because given the level of volatility, uncertainty and ambiguity in the world only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know. “The future ain’t what it used to be”, as the American baseball player Yogi Berra once put it.

The idea of a budget is so core to financial wisdom that it’s one of the first lessons we learnt from our parents for keeping our finances (and lives) on track. Annual Budgeting exercises have been the norm in almost all companies, big and small, across the world for decades. However, in recent years, there has been a lot of news about companies, some very prominent headline-grabbing ones, doing away with their annual budgets and moving to a monthly rolling forecast-based system.