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.

4-5 years ago in Microsoft, Cloud business was a small portion of the overall business, but now is the key business for the company, with new and diverse purchase options like subscription model on office 365, pay as you go model on Azure cloud platform... boosting and creating an avalanche of data every day.

Integrated Financial Planning (IFP) and Integrated Business Planning (IBP) mean different things to different people. Primarily because there is no universal definition of what “fully integrated” processes entail. This article presents a maturity model to explain what it means and the capabilities that comprise it.

The Seattle FP&A Board met on March 14th.  Larysa Melnychuk, Founder of the FP&A Board, moderated the discussion. The meeting was sponsored by SAP and Robert Half. 

The purpose of a statement of cash flows is to describe how businesses receive and spend money.  This purpose is seen as an end result of financial planning but this purpose can be seen as a starting point of financial planning.  As a starting point of financial planning, people should think about how to accumulate wealth from the receipt and disbursement of cash.

Data management is a business function that, in my opinion, every company should have. Still, often it is not the case. Managing data means that everybody in a company knows what data they (can) get and have a good understanding of what can it can be used for. It also means receiving data when and where it is needed. And finally, producing and working with data of acceptable quality.