The UK left the EU on Friday 31st January 2020, with mixed emotions, and eleven months of colossal negotiations on a trade deal ahead.  Business is also conflicted, with many concerns, but overall the reduction of political uncertainty has fostered a return to optimism.

A budget expresses thoughts with numbers. Numbers can be financial like income and cash flow or non-financial like time and volume. Expressing thoughts with financial and non-financial numbers can be done through a variety of methods. One method is zero based budgeting which like all methods has strengths and weaknesses. The purpose of this article is to examine the strengths and weaknesses of zero based budgeting. 

In February 2020, the Dubai FP&A Board gathered for the 7th time to discuss the subject of "Building Winning Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) Teams". Lukas Herbert, FP&A Director at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, facilitated the meeting.

As I walk around various offices or even in social gatherings, I find many conversations about artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), and big data. And logically, then, the discussion quite often rolls into how our life will change due to the availability of data, how each of our actions is turning into data, how future consumer behaviour thus can be predicted etc. Thus people quite often discuss predictive analysis (PA), and we hear stories about its use in elections to predict voters' behaviour, customer behaviour, payment risks, etc.