On November 5^th 2019 the sixth meeting of the Brussels FP&A Board, launched in November 2016, gathered 40 financial professionals from companies such as Anheuser-Busch InBev, Barco, Bekaert, Puratos, UCB, to name but a few.

The idea of a budget is so core to financial wisdom that it’s one of the first lessons we learnt from our parents for keeping our finances (and lives) on track. Annual Budgeting exercises have been the norm in almost all companies, big and small, across the world for decades. However, in recent years, there has been a lot of news about companies, some very prominent headline-grabbing ones, doing away with their annual budgets and moving to a monthly rolling forecast-based system.

Is your most fancied FP&A RPA initiative not delivering the anticipated benefits? You are not alone. So, what are the most common pitfalls? And more importantly, how can you sidestep them and increase your odds of a successful RPA implementation?

The Copenhagen FP&A Board took place on the 29th of October to debate the key factors for successful Rolling Forecast implementation.

Working at a local business unit often doesn’t give you access to sophisticated corporate systems to monitor performance. However, as a financial you are quickly immersed into daily operations, learning how things really work. A sample will be given of key indicators used to improve the cash forecast and position of a business unit. 

As an FP&A professional, one of the key foundation points is to build trust and respect with the business. Trust comes in many forms and is built over time, and is something that cannot be obtained immediately. Respect relies on providing quality and timely outputs that the business can rely on as a trusted partner. 

So how did I get there? This article is a snapshot of Turgut Kapisiz's journey and the steps involved.

In the age of metrics and measurement, what are we doing to measure the satisfaction or happiness of those involved in FP&A? When organizations have low employee engagement, they incur additional costs related to the overall drain on productivity, turn-over, etc.., but more importantly companies are missing out on the upside potential to grow and compete based on the creativity, innovation and hard-work invested by an engaged workforce. 

Businesses exist in order to improve the well-being of others.  One approach businesses use for achieving this goal is the concept of people/process/technology.  In businesses the element of people is the responsibility of human resources; human resources is responsible for the acquisition, compensation, and teaching of people.  How can human resources improve its ability to acquire, compensate, and teach people?  An answer is financial planning, thinking about how businesses can accumulate wealth.

You don’t have to go far to read something about a failed Merges and Acquisitions (M&A) transaction. One that comes to mind is the Sears-Kmart transaction which is cratering as we speak. It’s been called “the greatest destruction of retail value in history.” Remember the mega-merger between Kraft and Heinz? The New York Times recently called it a mega-mess. Oh, and that includes its accounting – I will talk more about that below.

Today’s FP&A practitioners are highly trained professionals with a greater ability to see the big picture, analyse and interpret data, and build predictive models. They are also experts in harnessing the power of information technology. They are able to create detailed cost and revenue databases that unlock patterns and trends in business behaviour and to build sophisticated and responsive forecasting models. We do rolling forecasts because we know they are better and because we can.