Well-designed incentive compensation plans – especially sales commission plans – are an incredibly powerful way to motivate great performance. But designing a great plan is both an art and a science.
FP&A Insights
FP&A Insights is a collection of useful case studies from leading international companies and thought leadership insights from FP&A experts. We aim to help you keep track of the best practices in modern FP&A, recognise changes in the ever-evolving world of financial planning and analysis and be well equipped to deal with them.
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By Randall Bolten, longtime Silicon Valley CFO, author of "Painting with Numbers: Presenting Financials and Other Numbers So People Will Understand You,” and adjunct professor at U.C. Berkeley Extension
As most forecasting methods require data, a forecaster analyzes the availability of data from both external and internal sources. The availability of external data is improving rapidly. With the explosion of Internet websites, potential sources of valuable data are becoming limitless. With unstructured data, the need for data mining tools has become a necessity for exploring potential sources of data for consumer analyses and predictive modelling purposes.
FP&A does not work in the finance silo of providing backward looking analysis of what has happened. They arm themselves and their operational and departmental leaders with the “why” of the performances and develop insights on trends. In the leading state of the FP&A Business Partnering Maturity model, FP&A is a credible partner that the business leaders can rely on when developing a sound strategy.
In an uncertain and fast-changing world, line managers need to be made aware of the uncertainties and risk inherent in the financial forecasts provided to them. Uncertainty is difficult to manage but uncertainties can be converted into known risk as forecasting capabilities and data management improve.