One of the realities that FP&A professionals need to realize is people tend to be too optimistic in their financial plans.  People tend to expect higher revenues, lower expenses, or less time to recover the amounts of their investments.  Psychologists label these expectations as optimism bias. As an accountant, I am guided by the conservatism principle.

In this recent interview with GTNews, Larysa Melnychuk sets out the fundamentals of FP&A,  its vital role within the organisation, its international aspects and future FP&A trends to watch.

As we know a simple matter of spotting bias – systematic under or over forecasting – can get surprisingly tricky in practice if our actions are to be guided by scientific standards of evidence – which they need to be if we are actually going to improve matters.

The average level of MAPE for your forecast is 25%. So what? Is it good or bad? Difficult to say. If it is bad, what should you do? Improve…obviously. But how?

After her  round of meetings with financial planning and analysis professionals across the globe, Larysa Melnychuk, managing director of the London FP&A Club, returned with plenty of stories and insights about the challenges they face.

Our approach to Corporate Financial Planning and Analysis is based on the following philosophy:

This website is dedicated to all those who want to improve organizational Financial Planning, Forecasting  and Analytics. In doing so we cover the function of Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) departments, and the role of technology, people and processes in the planning and monitoring process.

Our approach is based on practical experience, feedback from our diverse FP&A community, and in ensuring a common sense approach to managing organisational performance and decision making process.

A number of years ago I was contacted by a manager in the Health profession and asked if I could tell them 25 measures they should be tracking.

How do you think performance is  measured at the Olympics Games by the teams involved?   The number of gold medals?  The number of world records?

In this blog,  the author offers his insights on some of the challenges faced by practitioners in making sense of data and communicating it within organisations, and his ideas on how these shortcomings can be overcome. A few decades ago everything seemed so straightforward. When it came to planning and controlling businesses annual budgets were the only show in town. Things are very much different now.