In April 2019, the International FP&A Board held the 6th Frankfurt meeting where more than 30 senior finance practitioners shared their ideas about what is a new age of Zero Based Budgeting (ZBB).

Scenario planning is an important technique for a flexible and dynamic FP&A that enhances the decision-making process. In the analytically mature organisation, the standard approach of “three scenarios” (best, average and worst) is replaced with multiple on-demand scenarios that could be played in real time.

Business schools tend to divide their curriculum between hard quantitative-oriented courses, such as operations management and finance; and soft behavioral courses, such as change management, ethics and leadership. This separation of the curriculum is like chambers in a mansion.

The San Francisco FP&A Board met for the third time. In March 2019, the professional debate was devoted to the subject of FP&A Business Partnering. More than 30 senior finance professionals, representing companies such as Autodesk, BioMarin, Gensler, Google, HP, etc., shared their experience with each other. 

On March 28th 2019, the New York FP&A Board hosted its 5th meeting at the Michael Page offices in midtown Manhattan. Over 34 high profile finance professionals attended the event sponsored by SAP and Michael Page where the topic of discussion was Integrated FP&A.

Where is your finance team on the analytics maturity curve? Is finance in your organization providing prescriptive analytics to help steer the business? Is your financial planning and analysis team use artificial intelligence or machine learning to improve forecast accuracy? These are just a few of the many topics we discussed at the recent FP&A Board meeting in Toronto.
 

FP&A professionals are knowledge leaders with highly technical skills. While often seen as the smartest number crunchers in the room, what is overlooked is that FP&A leaders must be some of the most empathetic leaders and astute communicators in the company. 

Beyond Budgeting has now been around for twenty years. More and more companies across the world are embarking on a Beyond Budgeting journey, from global giants to smaller ones not yet strangled by corporate controls and bureaucracy, eager to protect their start-up agility as they grow.

The article is titled Mergers & Executions. It’s not a typo. You might think it should read Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). However, the fact is, most M&A activities could do better with execution from the pre-acquisition to the post-acquisition stages. This work will draw on practiced methods for companies to execute value-creating, not value-destroying acquisitions, with the guidance of their Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) teams.

The Launch of the Copenhagen FP&A Board took place on 2 April 2019. The first discussion was traditionally devoted to the Latest Trends in FP&A.