The financial numbers only show one side of the story. When FP&A professionals are presenting the complete story behind the numbers, soft data needs to be collected and incorporated. The big question is, what data and where is it?

While the world is slowly getting used to the post-pandemic life, the crisis revealed crucial learnings for how business and FP&A should interact. In this digest, we share tips on how to move towards an FP&A business advisor role, explain why systems thinking is a useful tool for finance business partners and describe how prescriptive analytics can level up the FP&A game.

It’s often been said that we’re in the agile phase of strategic thinking – the stage of strategic thought that focuses on flexibility in planning and rapid, quickly responding iterations - and it really can’t be emphasised enough just how important it is to build a responsive and agile FP&A strategy. It makes all the difference between an efficient and high-performing strategy and one that’s dead in the dust.

In the last years, the digital transformation had an accelerated impact not only on improving customer experience but also on financial planning and analysis (FP&A) processes. This article gives insights into an innovative finance investment controlling project recently created at Zalando. The project is a digital platform and process called internally “Investment App” developed in an agile approach, to supervise large capital expenditures across Zalando business units.