On October 22nd, 2020 the Global FP&A Trends group hosted another of its insightful webinars, putting in the spotlight the theme of Connected and Collaborative FP&A with its multiple facets – predictive planning, analytics supported by artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.

Financial models are crucial to the business but building them in Excel can be both complicated and frustrating. Setting up formulas and stipulating conditions takes time. And just when you think your model is water-tight, there is another error.

Many organisations over the last few years have been drumming on the need to become more data-driven and more “digital”. This short article looks at what potential implications that has for the Finance and Business Finance / FP&A function in particular.

Any crisis raises the question of whether costs can be truly fixed. What fixed costs can be reduced? There are several expense categories that should be investigated further when thinking about reducing costs.

At this meeting, we reviewed the latest FP&A team roles that are not typical for traditional management accounting. Watch the recording to learn from senior professionals from Nielsen, Kruger Products, Solera, Robert Half and SAP.

The Second Digital North American FP&A Board was held on the 27th of October 2020. We had five great presentations on the subject of “Building Winning FP&A Teams”, delivered by a truly international board panel based in the US, Canada and Europe.

How a finance function organises their teams will determine whether or not the teams can be successful. In recent years, an interesting phenomenon is emerging — companies are being more global, but at the same time centralising a lot of their functions.

FP&A professionals all over the world are looking for ways to accommodate a significant amount of uncertainty into their planning and forecasting processes, whilst also attempting to improve the decision-making routine. Therefore we chose to focus this FP&A Trends digest issue on FP&A transformation.

This FP&A Trends webinar is dedicated to the power of Connected and Collaborative planning. Learn more about key concepts, steps for implementation and 5 success factors.

As the appetite for detailed business insights is growing on data that is accumulating, we face the need for a stronger, true cooperation between FP&A and IT, to support faster, more accurate business decisions.