The modern FP&A role is evolving rapidly. We are moving from a traditional management accounting role to something much more multidisciplinary, with many new skills and knowledge required. This means that building a synergistic team is essential.

The highlight of this issue are three insightful case studies, which provide practical examples of successful team building at leading organisations. There is also an article from myself about the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of FP&A roles.

Throughout different business cases and concrete examples, the panel of experts present the needed evolution of FP&A team, linked to new capabilities that will make FP&A teams “winning” ones in the evolving environment.

The benefits of measuring seasonality of accuracy are that users can plan high/low scenarios for each prediction based on the season-specific range of possibilities.  Departments can adjust how much capacity, safety stock, or cash reserves are needed based on their own worst case.  And it's easier to determine missing factors for model improvement when you focus on adding predictors to the high noise areas of the model.

Traditional FP&A systems are typically focused on one aspect of the management process.  For example, setting a budget, collecting a forecast, or delivering results in the form of a report pack.

Over the past 20 years, there have been concerted efforts to combine these processes into a single system – after all, what’s the point of a budget if you can’t report against it or collect a forecast to see if year-end goals are going to be achieved?