Finance and FP&A communities are regularly traversed by theoretical and generally hot discussions concerning few topics that are at the heart of FP&A processes. Analytics systems, business partnering and budget are currently among of the main one.

Although this definitively permits to improve the FP&A impact and profile, we may be missing several aspects in those “vertical” discussions. Obviously, this is (more or less) relevant depending on company and market size and profile but still, it should be more present in the community discussions/thinking.

- The data flows and processes shall be look at globally. I mean from the operational activities (sales, logistics, manufacturing, …) through “accounting and analysis activities”, “planning and forecasting activities” to “reporting activities”. The consistency and efficiency over the whole/global process and data flow is key. In other words, it is largely inter-disciplinary. How do we achieve that? End customers, products, currency and geographical dimensions but also business elements such as price changes and discounts effects.

- These activities shall be customised to fit the company present and future business environment and profile. That is easily said but in practice how do we do it? Over the debate on budget vs forecast vs beyond budget …, how to ensure that company design takes in consideration (is influenced by) the different “time to …” specific to each relevant part of the business? How to evolve it alongside business geographical and customer environment and changes? How flexible should it be to material variations in the time to?

- These activities shall permit to measure and understand the business profitability, its trends and evolutions, the BUs and individual performance/contribution as well as facilitate the decision taking processes. As such,

• The information granularity is a key element that shall be assessed and customized. How to do it and find the relevant and efficient balance/mix? What referential types and structure put in place? How to arbitrate (or better combine) between financial and regulatory reporting and business reporting?
• The analysis, reporting, forecasting different outputs and periodicity shall follow the same route. How to make sure they are Simpson paradox free? How to insure their periodicity and multiplicity match the business natural timing, drivers and weak signal detection needs? How to ensure financial and business one?
• Targeting and reward/compensation would be part of it but is already very much discussed.

- Economic, business and competitive intelligence should be an important item but is quite often kept circumstantial in the overall picture.  How to organise such inputs? How do we picture the life cycle of the company markets and of the company products within those markets? How do we insure that the KPI’s, drivers, target setting, decision logics etc… are relevant and driven by this intelligence rather than by internal culture and power struggle?

Recommendation to any CFO or FP&A manager would be to insure there is a regular, practical evaluation/assessment of their companywide processes and to insure they fit their business in all these aspects. There are many concept, systems, practices on the market. The issue is not whether they got them all or which they got. The issue is whether the one they got fit their company for the present and the future considering its environment evolution and change. Still, how to do it? How to implement changes considering the rigidity imply by the different information systems intervening in the global processes? 

Those are discussions topics that should be useful to the finance community overall and to the FP&A professionals in particular (useful in the sense of bringing greater efficiency and impacts).