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

A: Read on...

Standards exist everywhere. They make our lives easier by providing a common “language” which we use to improve communication, and quickly understand complex materials for rapid, informed decision-making.

Composers and Musicians have music notation...

Architects, Engineers, and Builders have blueprints...

Motorists have road signs...

Yet surprisingly, there is no well-known financial report notation standard for FP&A Professionals!

Think about it… senior management and financial report consumers all around the globe, and sometimes even within the same company, make daily business decisions based on financial figures presented to them in a plethora of different ways and styles.

Each time they receive a new report, they need to first figure out and understand the layout and format, before they can get on with the task of analysing the numbers, interpreting the meaning, and taking action as required (decision-making).

For us older types that remember what a library is, imagine going to one to do some research, finding great books, but each is published in a different language; First you need to learn the language, only after which you can read the book!

And imagine if each book had its own script and font style, some were poorly laid-out, pages were not in order, and every publisher printed books using random coloured text on random coloured pages, without the colours having any common meaning or functional purpose.

And for the iPhone generation, imagine if online books contained distracting 3D graphs and charts, and flashy, dynamic, over-powering images and animations, all eating up precious screen real-estate, when all you want is to read a recipe or find the next train or bus to a destination.

Thankfully this is not actually the case; Libraries are among the most well-organized places there are, incorporating great examples of standards such as the Dewey Decimal System.

But to some extent, some of the inefficiencies and chaos describe above do make their way into financial report all over the world.

Report design is often not driven by FP&A departments who are the best at understanding their business needs. Design decisions are often made with other "stakeholders" dictating needs:

• The corporate logo/brand police want logos and corporate colours added
• The over-dominant senior executive who wants all reports “their way” despite the format not making sense
• The well-meaning but disconnected IT people driven by the latest cool visualization capabilities in their software tool of choice.

Arrgh!

Thankfully, the International Business Communication Standards (IBCS®) are design to rescue FP&A professionals by addressing all of these challenges. Companies like Coca-Cola, Swiss Post, T-Mobile, SAP, Credit-Suisse, Lufthansa, Philips, and Swarovski are already using IBCS® to standardize their financial reporting, and improving report comprehension and decision-making across their organizations.

And the best thing… the IBCS® standard is free-of-cost and royalty-free, allowing anyone to leverage many years of pioneering work by Professor Rolf Hichert and his SUCCESS principles, Dr. Jürgen Faisst, as well as many other contributors and members of the IBCS® Association.