In this article, the author outlines the concept of a shadow budget and emphasises the benefits of creating one. He also considers the challenges FP&A professionals may face when using it.
Ken Fick
Kenneth Fick holds CPA and MBA degrees and has over 25 years of finance experience providing leading-edge solutions designed to improve forecasting, budgeting, planning, and decision-making to companies with revenues ranging from $3 million to $50 billion.
He managed teams responsible for leading corporate and business-level analytics, financial and capital budgeting processes, and provided various ad-hoc and standard reporting to senior management and board-level executives. He was a corporate financial planning analyst at a large financial services company, strategic planning analyst, account management supervisor, and auditor for a Fortune 500 retailer.
Author's Articles
A question frequently asked by businesses of all sizes is what should my Key-Performance-Indicators (KPIs) be and how many should I have? They often look to other companies in their industry including suppliers and customers to see what they may use to run their business. Frequently, they are fraught with frustration by the lack of data in the public domain.
Defining what Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) does has always been challenging. Most people place FP&A in the Office of the CFO, which makes sense, for many of us have certainly played the role of CFO a time or two. Still, as business partners, strategists and advisors, that is also not necessarily a perfect fit. This categorisation may change as our roles continue to expand to become the central hub of corporate analytics and reporting.