As more and more enterprises endeavor to move from a centralized, command and control structure to more agile and decentralized business units, the biggest constraint felt by many is the way financial control is exercised via traditional budgeting and budgetary control.

The Plan, Prioritize and Execute (PPE) model is an effective tool for an integrated strategic and financial planning exercise. It can be used by both large and small businesses and accommodate different budgeting methodologies.

It is commonly agreed that the traditional budgeting process is time-consuming and costly. It rarely focuses on strategy and adds little value. Although traditional budgets have evolved over the years, they can hardly meet the challenges of the modern economic and business environment.

FP&A and finance need to have a set of scenarios to support the decision-making process. This is especially important in the fast-changing and evolving environment.

In the 30th issue, you will find information on the reasons that companies transit to an all-in-one platform, tips on identifying faulty KPIs and a video on FP&A digitalisation journey. As usual, at the bottom of the digest, we have added invitation links to our upcoming webinars on agile FP&A and data visualisation.

Networking; the mere mention of the word is enough to strike fear into the heart of many finance professionals. Perhaps we view it through a prism of insincerity; repeating to ourselves that finance is a technical role and hard work and ability will get me where I need to go.

On the 27th of January 2021, I had the pleasure of facilitating the second Digital Benelux FP&A board meeting. The subject under discussion was “The Art and Science of Digitised FP&A Business partnering”, delivered by a truly international board panel of 5 members based in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands and Germany.

There is a lot of hype these days about the concept of FP&A Business Partnering. However, only 25% of FP&A’s time is spent on value-adding activities such as decisions support and business partnering (as per FP&A Trends Survey 2020).

The FP&A Trends Webinar: 2025 FP&A Trends Survey: Benchmarks, Priorities, and Best Practices

Register here

On 3 December, we had an interesting debate on why extended planning and analysis (xP&A) is playing an increasingly important role in finance. Senior finance professionals from Deutsche Bahn, Jedox and Microsoft shared their views on the subject.