The sixth meeting of the Boston FP&A Board was held on February 27, 2020, to address a popular subject of  Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB). What is new in ZBB of the 21st century? How can it be useful for addressing the challenges of traditional budgeting culture

Finance transformation is high on the agenda for the majority of finance departments. What is driving this? There are a number of push factors that are important.

This is one of a series of three blogs – assessing some of the predictions about the future role of finance. The other two blogs focus on the skills needed for the digital world, one covering technical/digital knowledge and the other covering soft skills.

When creating a driver-based model, it is important to produce one that is not overly detailed or complex but one that is accurate and actionable. Avoid complexity by adding variables if they do not provide analytical benefit. Starting with the chart of accounts is not a good idea. The model should focus on key performance drivers. 

By deploying integrated FP&A organisations see greater performance improvements compared with traditional FP&A processes. This is enabled through combining strategic planning, business planning and forecasting and operations planning and forecasting.

The UK left the EU on Friday 31st January 2020, with mixed emotions, and eleven months of colossal negotiations on a trade deal ahead.  Business is also conflicted, with many concerns, but overall the reduction of political uncertainty has fostered a return to optimism.

A budget expresses thoughts with numbers. Numbers can be financial like income and cash flow or non-financial like time and volume. Expressing thoughts with financial and non-financial numbers can be done through a variety of methods. One method is zero based budgeting which like all methods has strengths and weaknesses. The purpose of this article is to examine the strengths and weaknesses of zero based budgeting. 

In February 2020, the Dubai FP&A Board gathered for the 7th time to discuss the subject of "Building Winning Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) Teams". Lukas Herbert, FP&A Director at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, facilitated the meeting.

As I walk around various offices or even in social gatherings, I find many conversations about artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), and big data. And logically, then, the discussion quite often rolls into how our life will change due to the availability of data, how each of our actions is turning into data, how future consumer behaviour thus can be predicted etc. Thus people quite often discuss predictive analysis (PA), and we hear stories about its use in elections to predict voters' behaviour, customer behaviour, payment risks, etc.

A core aspect of financial planning & analysis (FP&A) is forecasting and budgeting. In this article, exposed are some of the more common myths so frequently accepted as truth within FP&A groups around the globe.