The role of the CFO is changing: It’s moving away from compliance and optimization, towards a more strategic; customer facing disruptive role. How is technology empowering Finance teams?

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.

In his 26-minute presentation, Paul Ashley Head of Applications, Lloyds Development Capital Limited, explained how the company has successfully implemented a digitised approach to business partnering, financial forecasting, and the private equity valuation process. 

Explaining and forecasting activity evolutions require to isolate correctly different factors (variables) that have an impact such as quantity, price, customer win/loss, competition. In the international environment, currencies and currency variances are one of the important variables.

Strategic planning is mostly done with qualitative analysis. In this article, we will explore the use of quantitative tools, how to narrow down the number of variables to focus on and what tools can help with managing multiple scenarios.  

Financial models are crucial to the business but building them in Excel can be both complicated and frustrating. Setting up formulas and stipulating conditions takes time. And just when you think your model is water-tight, there is another error.