Many commercial finance or FP&A professionals focus on getting the model right and not enough time considering the how people are going to react to the outcome. This blog sets out a few tips to navigate the politics. In the words of Oscar Wilde ‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple’.

Finance professionals can serve in a wide variety of areas within an organization. However, some of these areas have had high demands over the last few years, especially the demand for professionals with specific skill sets and experience in business and financial analysis, and data analytics.

As financial professionals we Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) professionals spend a lot of timing learning - learning the basics of accounting and finance, learning the business and learning about the impacts business decisions have on budgets and forecasts.

The article is titled Mergers & Executions. It’s not a typo. You might think it should read Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). However, the fact is, most M&A activities could do better with execution from the pre-acquisition to the post-acquisition stages. This work will draw on practiced methods for companies to execute value-creating, not value-destroying acquisitions, with the guidance of their Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) teams.

Companies reducing the size of their Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) finance teams are cutting valuable resources in the misbelief that is not a priority. That’s untrue. So what’s the role of FP&A in today’s company anyway?

According to Google's Chief Economist, Dr. Hal Varian, "The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it— that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades."