In an uncertain world, plans with a single focus are no longer sufficient. Management needs to constantly scan the business environment, assess what lies beyond the ‘span of predictability’, and be prepared for a multitude of realities.

For FP&A in today’s business climate, agile planning is basically the speed and flexibility with which organisations can make adjustments to what it wants to achieve.

Budgets were invented in the Industrial Age as an efficient management tool. So why in this day and age of VUCA, most of the organisations around the world are still so hung up on traditional budgeting?

Join the Digital Middle Eastern FP&A Circle on the 6th of June at 5:00 PM GST to hear insights from senior practitioners and thought leaders about Maximising Value Creation with FP&A Business Partnering. 

The International FP&A Board now restarts face-to-face events, continuing our mission of learning the latest trends in FP&A through discussion and collaboration. The first meeting of the Houston FP&A Board will discuss what lessons the pandemic has taught us. 

The current debate around Return To Office (RTO) likely heralds the biggest shift in the workplace since the emergence of the assembly line in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Is this relevant for an FP&A audience though? I’d argue it is fundamentally relevant for a number of reasons, not least because it is one of the biggest impacts of Covid-19 on the global business environment. This is a debate that, from a financial planning and analysis perspective, we cannot sit out. 

Traditionally, Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) teams were made of analysts. Today, in this incredible environment of constant change and uncertainties, the synergistic teams have to be multi-skilled. What are those emerging roles that we have to play in order to be successful in planning and forecasting?

Microsoft’s mission is to empower all people and organisations to achieve more. But the company has also been striving to achieve more itself, and xP&A has been instrumental in this pursuit.

Those who follow developments in FP&A closely have proclaimed a New Age of Zero-Based Budgeting. So what exactly does this mean? What do organisations find so appealing about this alternative to traditional budgeting, and how can we best implement it?

Scenario Planning is a technique used in FP&A to help guide companies through considerable uncertainty, contemplating various paths of possibilities. Despite our best attempts, our forecasts will have inherent errors; actual results deviating from the figures we had anticipated hitting.