Does your finance department add true value to the business? Do you see finance influence decision making in your organisation? Is finance always invited to attend strategic business meetings? If the answer to any of the above questions is “no”, it means a transformation from controlling to finance business partnering function is needed.

What is the Holy Grail for any leader? For me, it is to create a high-performance team AND to sustain that team over time through high-performance leadership. That is not easy to do, so when we get the chance to learn from someone who has managed to do it really well, we must pay close attention. In this first “FP&A Talks” we’re speaking to Fredrik Hedlund, Senior Vice President and CFO for Global Connect at Nielsen. Fredrik is one of the few senior leaders who has truly invested in creating a high-performance leadership team and it shows. “FP&A Talks” is a new series running on fpa-trends.com featuring senior leaders in Financial Planning & Analysis who share their views on how we can create a world-class FP&A department. 

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!

Connected Planning is an effective way to unify data, people, and plans on a single platform. Implemented correctly, it can help accelerate better business performance in the modern dynamic market conditions. The question is then, how to use it to achieve desired results? Watch this interactive webinar to find out.

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.