Ask anyone working in the finance field now, how much time you consume in some manual tasks; such as data entry, accumulation & validation of data, accounts reconciliation & preparing some basic statements or reports. Unfortunately, statistics say that more than 35% from Accounting & Finance Teams spent from 50 to 70% from their time on manual processes & data entry on ERP systems!

Digital transformation has created new opportunities. It's possible to generate insight from more sources of data, faster than ever before. But technological advances have also increased competitive pressure. How can FP&A teams adapt to these challenges and redefine their role in modern business? How can FP&A remain relevant in an organisation where everyone is an analyst?

The crux of the analytics movement is making better decisions and more organizations are moving towards a data-driven culture, but only about a third of organizations surveyed said they would describe their current culture as data-driven. So, where is the disconnect?

4-5 years ago in Microsoft, Cloud business was a small portion of the overall business, but now is the key business for the company, with new and diverse purchase options like subscription model on office 365, pay as you go model on Azure cloud platform... boosting and creating an avalanche of data every day.

In Part 1 of this article, we explained the data challenges faced by FP&A as well as how the expectations of the FP&A user community has evolved through the generations. In this article, we will explain how the boundaries have changed and the implementation framework.

Any activity or business process executed in the various departments across the enterprise has an impact on the financials. At a macro level, the interaction of the Finance organization with the rest of the enterprise can be bucketed into three categories: