The role of planning is to help manage what can be controlled (i.e. the organisation’s business processes, the resources it applies to those processes, and the volume and quality of work done in those processes) to produce outcomes that will achieve organisational objectives, within an uncontrollable and unknowable external environment.

Spreadsheets are without doubt the ‘killer’ application that turned the PC into an indispensable business tool. Before then, computing was the preserve of geeks and specialists who spoke in a language few accountants could understand as they served expensive, inaccessible machines locked away in their own air-conditioned environment.

Analytic models are rarely static. Their aim is to model the organisation in such a way as to allow managers to investigate what is actually going on and to assess changes to the way it operates.

Q: What do motorists, composers, musicians, architects, engineers, and builders have, that FP&A professionals don't?

A: Read on...

Financial model definitions can be tricky. Financial models are often dependent upon numerous functional areas and academic disciplines, such as accounting, finance and statistics. These disciplines may have differing uses of the same terminology. Model risk management has also drawn on numerous disciplines in its evolution.

Through the financial crisis, the advent of drill down database capabilities and with direction from the Federal government, financial modeling is evolving into both a defined art and science.