This paper covers the findings of our sixth annual FP&A Trends Survey, where we share the trends and challenges facing FP&A departments around the world. The survey was performed at a time where organisations were looking to recover from the pandemic when many were trying to figure out how to operate in a changed business world.

Fortunately, an increasing number of organisations have come to embrace what IFP&A can offer. These people ‘step outside the box' and create solutions that are both innovative and that help management to improve organisational performance.

The benefits of measuring seasonality of accuracy are that users can plan high/low scenarios for each prediction based on the season-specific range of possibilities.  Departments can adjust how much capacity, safety stock, or cash reserves are needed based on their own worst case.  And it's easier to determine missing factors for model improvement when you focus on adding predictors to the high noise areas of the model.

As Einstein said, “In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.”  This survey we believe offers hope, insight, and a much-needed reality check on where FP&A is today.  It also forecasts what needs to happen for FP&A teams to develop their best practices from theory into reality. 

Companies nowadays are looking at using specialised FP&A solutions to help improve the accuracy and efficiency of the forecasting process. Depending on the maturity of the FP&A function, we can roughly divide companies into three levels of maturity in terms of their use of specialised FP&A solutions.

As long as there are humans involved in making a forecast, the forecast will be biased. But there are some steps to make a forecast unbiased. This article will look into the unbiased forecasting framework and will explore the methods where humans have minimal influence on the outcome.