Business schools tend to divide their curriculum between hard quantitative-oriented courses, such as operations management and finance; and soft behavioral courses, such as change management, ethics and leadership. This separation of the curriculum is like chambers in a mansion.

Beyond Budgeting has now been around for twenty years. More and more companies across the world are embarking on a Beyond Budgeting journey, from global giants to smaller ones not yet strangled by corporate controls and bureaucracy, eager to protect their start-up agility as they grow.

The article is titled Mergers & Executions. It’s not a typo. You might think it should read Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). However, the fact is, most M&A activities could do better with execution from the pre-acquisition to the post-acquisition stages. This work will draw on practiced methods for companies to execute value-creating, not value-destroying acquisitions, with the guidance of their Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) teams.

Integrated Financial Planning (IFP) and Integrated Business Planning (IBP) mean different things to different people. Primarily because there is no universal definition of what “fully integrated” processes entail. This article presents a maturity model to explain what it means and the capabilities that comprise it.

The purpose of a statement of cash flows is to describe how businesses receive and spend money.  This purpose is seen as an end result of financial planning but this purpose can be seen as a starting point of financial planning.  As a starting point of financial planning, people should think about how to accumulate wealth from the receipt and disbursement of cash.

Data management is a business function that, in my opinion, every company should have. Still, often it is not the case. Managing data means that everybody in a company knows what data they (can) get and have a good understanding of what can it can be used for. It also means receiving data when and where it is needed. And finally, producing and working with data of acceptable quality.