One of the biggest transformations in the finance departments recently, has been the shift for an Accountant to move from a compliance and governance based individual, to an insight driven value added business partner. In the past, accountants could get by doing monthly reporting, statutory accounts and tax returns and justify their role within an organisation.
By Andrew Codd, Founder and Lead Producer The Strength In The Numbers Show
The author Andrew Codd is the producer of the Strength in the Numbers Podcast which interviews real finance practitioners to break down their hard-won lessons and deconstruct their practical methods that work on the job and which you won't typically find in textbooks or exams so that we create more influential finance professionals worldwide who solve meaningful problems for their organisations and in return have fun, rewarding and successful careers in finance. FP&A teams have been growing in popularity because they have always known about one big thing that drove and accelerated value better than anything else, which other functions and teams sometimes forget. This is why organisations then, and even those today, need a FP&A team. So what is this one big thing?
I was recently invited to join FP&A-Trends’ Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) Committee by Larysa Melnychuk, managing director. The AI/ML committee is comprised of finance practitioners and data-management/science experts. This blog is based on the committee’s first two meetings in 2018.
Statistical approaches to forecasting can provide a framework for creating rolling budgets to which analytical skills and judgment can be applied in supporting a sound budgeting process.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is now becoming a reality in Finance. AI is already impacting our everyday lives – through the adverts we see on Facebook, the shows selected for us on Netflix to the Google automated assistant being able to book meetings for us.
The concept of Zero Based Budgeting (ZBB) is by no means new. It has been around for almost 50 years and has been used by many commercial and non-commercial organisations whose overriding objectives are to shed the unnecessary expenses.