We held our third FP&A Board meeting in Frankfurt at the historic Frankfurt Skyper Villa. This time, the interactive discussion was about Best Practices in Rolling Forecast.

Agenda

• Rolling Forecast: main definitions, advantages, and disadvantages
• Rolling Forecast: 7 factors of success
• Beyond Budgeting and Rolling Forecast
• Mini-case study from Anna Maria Bausback, Corporate Board Office Director at Aareal Bank AG
• Three Stages of Rolling Forecast Maturity- group work
• Conclusions and recommendations

The Rolling Forecast (RF) has been bringing together a lot of passionate finance practitioners globally. Frankfurt is not an exception — 27 strong German finance leaders shared their ideas and insights with a lot of passion. They represented large international and local organisations, such as:

• Avira
• Dematic
• Kao
• Lufthansa Cargo
• Merz Pharma
• Sodexo
• UL
• and many others.

Our global statistics show that around 40% of the companies already implemented RF but only around 20-25% of them are satisfied with the results. There are a number of reasons why the RF adoption rate is so low. They were discussed at the meeting alongside some other burning questions about Rolling Forecast. Below are some key insights from the Board:

• RF helps to speed up the decision-making process.
• If implemented correctly, it significantly reduces the annual budgeting time.
• RF encourages agility.
• It helps to harmonize top down and bottom up planning processes.
• RF improves planning collaboration.
• It is not working for the culture of “judgemental planning”.
• For its successful implementation, driver-based models and flexible systems are essential.
• Business Culture is the key. If the company is not ready, Rolling Forecast will not help.

Our Sponsors

Thanks a lot to our global partner Regus for hosting the meeting in their beautiful building. We are very grateful to our technology sponsor CCH Tagetik and to our educational partner AFP for their great support.