This article considers the spectrum of approaches to sales planning, ranging from automated and arithmetic to granular and hands-on. The article ends with a methodology that could give you the best of both worlds in a modern business environment.

Getting data-driven insights fast can be a significant competitive differentiator you can bring to your organisation. But when it comes to making the actual decisions that drive your forecasting and planning, the author would argue that you would be better served by building in a pause at this point. In this article, the author compares a game of golf with effective planning and decision-making, explaining why it is better to slow down sometimes.

According to FP&A Trends Survey 2022, there are two major problems today: 

When looking at immediate challenges, it can be difficult to justify ROI on FP&A technology against shorter-term sales. 

In some companies, FP&A is not considered to be an area for strategic investment.

How can this possibly be the case when especially cloud-based technology has been considered the saving grace of doing business during the pandemic?

The current debate around Return To Office (RTO) likely heralds the biggest shift in the workplace since the emergence of the assembly line in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Is this relevant for an FP&A audience though? I’d argue it is fundamentally relevant for a number of reasons, not least because it is one of the biggest impacts of Covid-19 on the global business environment. This is a debate that, from a financial planning and analysis perspective, we cannot sit out.