Improving financial planning and analysis (FP&A) means investing in people and systems. It only takes three pages to design a process and identify new roles and responsibilities. This method is described in this article and has been used to introduce new financial processes and operational reports.

FP&A teams are skilled at pulling data from various information systems, manipulating it, and gathering insights. Although FP&A plays a crucial role in supporting companies in becoming more intelligent, there is a lot to think about when getting ready for big data and the FP&A transformation journey. Below are a few things to consider. This list will continue to evolve as we all learn from each other. 

 At a time when the FP&A framework is being extended to the entire organisation (into Extended Planning & Analysis (xP&A)), FP&A Business Partnering need to keep up with this new model to stay relevant and cutting edge. xP&A Business Partnering is now the latest trend that is going well beyond just Finance involving the entire organisation to move FP&A and planning to the next level.

Changing consumer behaviours, supply chain shifts, and innovations in data analytics have pushed FP&A professionals to reconsider their approach to revenue planning processes. Those processes are both strategic and operational and require complete visibility on all data and drivers.

In this 7-minute presentation, Rodolphe Aubin argues that FP&A transformation should be seen as an opportunity to generate much more value for the business rather than a threat. What is the formula to successfully deploy intelligent FP&A?

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.