Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) play a pivotal role between Strategy, Business and Data: a business partner advisor, helping to form a pathway that navigates an uncertain future, but in reality, the value created is very difficult to measure.

Cost Accounting provides insight into the relationship between financial sacrifices and financial benefits. There are a number of elements within this discipline that support this relationship. FP&A stimulates thinking about activities that create sacrifices in order to create benefits. These activities develop a framework for understanding what organizations are doing and where they are going.  The question is: which element of Cost Accounting develops a meaningful framework that links activities to understanding?

Please forgive me for my persistent rant and criticism against accountants who budget poorly or continue to calculate the substantial and growing high indirect and shared costs originating from resource expenses such as salaries, supplies, power, information technologies, and travel. I cannot seem to hold back my frustration.

Driver-based planning (DBP) is an essential part of the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) armoury, enabling organisations – ranging from the smallest non-profit to a multinational – to become quicker, more dynamic and agile in their planning and in responding to internal and external changes in the business environment. 

Criticism is defined as “the expression of disapproval of something based on perceived mistakes.”  FP&A is a learning process that creates insight into what organizations are doing and where they are going. Processes are not perfect; mistakes are likely to occur.  As a result, FP&A practitioners need to recognize that their work is subject to criticism.

At a dinner party last night, one of the guests posed a question: Imagine a roomful of people chosen at random. How many people need to be in the room for there to be at least a 50% probability that at least two of the people have the same birthday?