At the end of the day, FP&A isn’t a technical department. Its role is to develop the operating and financial plan and help the organisation to achieve set goals. It is therefore very important to receive technical support and advice from qualified professionals. This support will be much more helpful if it considers finance and planning specifics. In other words, the technology specialist should be a part of Finance or, even better, the Planning department itself. This role can be called a “Finance Technology Officer” or FTO.

The financial manager must accept that if the plan goes well and is considered excellent, credit goes to the boss. If it goes badly, then the no-decision manager blames the financial manager. The no-decision boss will present the plan as though it is their own and will never reveal that it was prepared by someone else.

This paper, based on our interviews with 25 top FP&A practitioners and thought leaders along with case studies from the largest global network of FP&A people, captures the best practices and new ideas coming out of this fast-growing area.

The webinar was proudly sponsored by:

Jack Welch was quoted as saying, “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, then the end is near.”

For FP&A, effective communication centres on 'storytelling' — the art of conveying numerical analysis as a cohesive narrative instead of a set of disjointed figures. It is hard to overstate the importance of storytelling. How FP&A professional presents their data determines how they are viewed