Business partnering is something everyone is talking about right now. The premise is that the more low-value finance tasks are automated, the more time finance practitioners have to work with their “customers” in the business. The only problem is that many business leaders are far from satisfied with finance’s performance to date as a valued business partner.

FP&A in a small sized business is different than in a large, corporate firm. While one can argue that we all face a lack of time and resources, there often is no dedicated FP&A function in a smaller enterprise. FP&A team members in a smaller firm are wearing many more hats than FP&A. Again, we don’t have too many people that report to us (if any) that are analysts. 

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.