CEOs that are more strategically oriented and less numbers-oriented tend to want to partner with a CFO who has a strong command of the numbers. When that's not the case, and we have CEOs or leadership teams that are focused on their matrix, it can be challenging for the finance organisation. In the new article, Joao Almeida and Rich Feldman discuss some of the current challenges facing leaders in finance, and the role of capital planning in a time of increased uncertainty.

Despite the current circumstances of the COVID-19 epidemic, many FP&A teams have been able to adapt to the challenges and even become more effective during the crisis. Remote working or part-time working has led to more collaboration and is paving the way for new opportunities for both people and organisations. This article will describe the current FP&A challenges and the ways how FP&A teams can address them.

Increasingly, FP&A’s most valued skill is turning data/facts into a story and putting these into context. However, there is generally too little focus on the actual art and science of storytelling, the primary tool in business partnering. This article on Storytelling will evolve around the three core elements of a good story – the narrative, visuals and data and cover how combining these allows FP&A to fulfil our goal in life of influencing change.

The KPIs you choose to measure the performance of your business, the KPIs you use in traffic lights, and the gauges in your dashboards drive the efforts of your teams and shape your business. In this article, we explain the strategic role of dashboard design and how to set the right KPIs and benchmarks for your business.

Successful implementation of an FP&A software requires clarity on the selected tools, delivery methodology and business benefits that the solution aims to deliver. The six considerations set out below aim to improve success for FP&A implementation.

The financial numbers only show one side of the story. When FP&A professionals are presenting the complete story behind the numbers, soft data needs to be collected and incorporated. The big question is, what data and where is it?

While the world is slowly getting used to the post-pandemic life, the crisis revealed crucial learnings for how business and FP&A should interact. In this digest, we share tips on how to move towards an FP&A business advisor role, explain why systems thinking is a useful tool for finance business partners and describe how prescriptive analytics can level up the FP&A game.

It’s often been said that we’re in the agile phase of strategic thinking – the stage of strategic thought that focuses on flexibility in planning and rapid, quickly responding iterations - and it really can’t be emphasised enough just how important it is to build a responsive and agile FP&A strategy. It makes all the difference between an efficient and high-performing strategy and one that’s dead in the dust.

In the last years, the digital transformation had an accelerated impact not only on improving customer experience but also on financial planning and analysis (FP&A) processes. This article gives insights into an innovative finance investment controlling project recently created at Zalando. The project is a digital platform and process called internally “Investment App” developed in an agile approach, to supervise large capital expenditures across Zalando business units.

What could Beyond Budgeting mean for your enterprise — and what benefits are available if you move past traditional command-and-control approaches to finance? With the right technology, companies will be better equipped to operate in a more agile way and achieve their financial goals.