“If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.”

For FP&A professionals the box is budgets.

Two years ago, the company moved away from our annual budget and monthly variance reports, and adopted quarterly rolling forecasts supported by key performance indicators and scorecards. Is this approach useful to a line manager?

Why may businesses not seek out, or even resist, greater involvement of their FP&A partner? What is the basis of successful FP&A Business Partnering? Find out by joining this FP&A Board Connect online meeting, where David Wittenberg, Finance Manager at Providence St. Joseph Health and Valerie Martin, Finance Director at Autodesk, will share their practical insights on the subject.

At this difficult and uncertain time of global Black Swans and Perfect Storms, the demand for modern FP&A knowledge is higher than ever before. Keeping this in mind, the team at International FP&A Board has decided to start sharing the insights from more than 200 Board meetings with our global professional community.

Over the last 4 years, we have held more than 200 meetings in 27 cities, 16 countries, and across 4 continents. It has been incredibly inspiring to see so many FP&A senior practitioners come together to shape the future of our profession. We would like to share this accumulated knowledge with the entire FP&A community.

One of the advantages of working in the domain of FP&A is that it provides excellent opportunity to learn about many aspects of the business. This enables the individual to, not only do the job with a more solid ground, but to also get a better picture of what and how is done in the other departments. Additionally, working closely with colleagues from different functions increases one’s visibility in the organization. But how do you get started in FP&A?

This FP&A Board Connect meeting will be delivered from France. Stéphanie Didier, Finance Director, and Tina Vermeyen, Digital Transformation Manager at Janssen, Johnson & Johnson will share their company's Predictive and ML forecasting journey.

Lukas Herbert,  FP&A Director ICMEA at Takeda, the speaker of the sixth and the facilitator of the seventh Dubai FP&A Board will share his insights on the subject. What is a journey to Zero-Based Budgeting? What lessons should be learned? Find out by joining this FP&A Board Connect.

The second FP&A Board Connect will be dedicated to the topic of "Zero-Based Budgeting in Multinationals".  Paul Harris, Experienced Commercial Finance Director and a member of the London FP&A Board will share his extensive ZBB experience with us. How does ZBB work in multinational companies?  What are the pros and cons? What is the most important success factor? Find out by joining this FP&A Board Connect short and insightful digital meeting.

In this article, I share my view on the key skills to have when you want to work in Finance and how they bring value to your organization.

The first FP&A Board Connect digital meeting will be launched from Japan. Takeshi Murakami, Business Manager to CEO/President at Microsoft Japan, who is also a member of the Tokyo FP&A Board, will share his company's experience on "Using Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning for FP&A"