They say a picture is worth a thousand words… Telling a story is one of the most important tasks FP&A professionals are facing, and data visualization is a powerful tool to reveal stories. This tool can help filter out the noise and generate valuable business insights.
To provide the best support to the business leaders, FP&A needs to quickly leverage the accounting information at hand. This article covers three critical aspects of telling the business story behind the numbers.
This series of articles focuses on blowing up this stereotype by demonstrating how Finance in general and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) in particular can change its language, use the right part of the brain to throw light on the most important business drivers, revive figures and make them tell a story that is easy to perceive and take action on.
There are so many great stories to be told in FP&A! Due to technological advances, FP&A professionals now have access to advanced analytics, flexible dashboarding and effective data visualisation tools.
Knowing your numbers is a good starting point for an FP&A professional. But it is also required to know how to present the findings to others.
We are all storytellers in a sense but FP&A stories need particular skills to be great. In an era led by technology, data and automation, where do the stories fit? How will the FP&A stories of the future be told? What are the skills needed to be a great FP&A storyteller?