​The daily routine of FP&A professionals revolves around providing reports and analyses for senior and operational management, to manage core processes such as budgeting, forecasting, cost allocation and consolidation. And usually they are hard-pressed for time.

To paraphrase the concept of Occam's razor, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex explanations. In a sense, the answer is in the question, "How do we make the complex easier to understand?" Keep the explanations simple.

The purpose of an income statement is to describe the delivery of products or the provision of services. 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 delivery of products or the provision of services.

The great thing about being in FP&A is that we get to observe in real life and hear stories about many interactions, good and bad, between many colleagues across the business.

In this article, Steve Morlidge argues that the quality of business forecasting is unacceptably poor. He goes on to present six simple principles that will help executives significantly improve the performance of their forecast processes.

Imagine you have 3 minutes to explain to a six year old what FP&A is and what  place it takes in a business ecosystem. Tough, isn’t it? What are things that a six year old would understand? For example, animals, right?