After her  round of meetings with financial planning and analysis professionals across the globe, Larysa Melnychuk, managing director of the London FP&A Club, returned with plenty of stories and insights about the challenges they face.

In this blog,  the author offers his insights on some of the challenges faced by practitioners in making sense of data and communicating it within organisations, and his ideas on how these shortcomings can be overcome. A few decades ago everything seemed so straightforward. When it came to planning and controlling businesses annual budgets were the only show in town. Things are very much different now.

We live in an era with an interconnected global economy, where constant change and uncertainty are taken as a given but planning for such an environment is not easy. Flexible and dynamic financial planning and analysis (FP&A) can help firms to cope.

FP&A goes by many names. In Germany, it is called “Controlling”.  From my previous visits to Germany, I know that German Controllers are different from Accountants: they are forward-looking, analytical and often very technical in their approaches. Recently, I got a great opportunity to learn how FP&A is evolving in Europe’s strongest economy.

The past 5 years have seen significant transformations in the FP&A world. I have been fortunate enough to have travelled extensively and seen these changes. I saw a lot of changes in the FP&A World first-hand: both successful and painful. I met a lot of FP&A professionals – hard working, exciting, inspiring and often burned out.