This website is dedicated to all those who want to improve organizational Financial Planning, Forecasting  and Analytics. In doing so we cover the function of Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) departments, and the role of technology, people and processes in the planning and monitoring process.

Our approach is based on practical experience, feedback from our diverse FP&A community, and in ensuring a common sense approach to managing organisational performance and decision making process.

A number of years ago I was contacted by a manager in the Health profession and asked if I could tell them 25 measures they should be tracking.

How do you think performance is  measured at the Olympics Games by the teams involved?   The number of gold medals?  The number of world records?

In this blog,  the author offers his insights on some of the challenges faced by practitioners in making sense of data and communicating it within organisations, and his ideas on how these shortcomings can be overcome. A few decades ago everything seemed so straightforward. When it came to planning and controlling businesses annual budgets were the only show in town. Things are very much different now.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words… “Telling the story” is one of the most important tasks facing the FP&A professional, and data visualization is a powerful tool to reveal this story. Data visualisation is vital for FP&A analytics: it can help to reveal hidden trends and patterns, to filter out the noise and to generate valuable business insights. In other words, there are two types of data visualisation:

The search for a “single version of the truth” and how to “make FP&A a trusted business advisory unit to the boardroom … like an internal dynamic Harvard/MIT unit” were among key trends identified by the London FP&A Board.

Nearly every financial planning and analysis professional understands the need to embrace big data and analytics. But how can firms move beyond basics to advanced analytics? That challenge was on every attendee’s mind at the recent FP&A advisory board meeting in London. There, FP&A and business intelligence professionals gathered to discuss the state of business intelligence (BI) and FP&A analytics with Nigel Geary, BI specialist at power utility British Gas.

The financial planning and analysis (FP&A)  board met for the third time in London on 1 May at Hermes Fund Managers’ offices in the City of London. Marc Lloyd, the firm’s head of FP&A, again played host to Ash Sharma, head of FP&A at Alliance Boots Healthcare; Darren Craddock, director of planning and forecasting at insurer Aviva; and Frederik Reynaert, head of financial planning and reporting at travel firm Thomas Cook.

The inaugural full meeting of the London FP&A  Board confined itself to detailing the attributes required of an FP&A professional and the evening’s roundtable discussion produced a set of best practice recommendations detailing the necessary skills and mix of different personalities that should go into building a successful FP&A team.

We live in an era with an interconnected global economy, where constant change and uncertainty are taken as a given but planning for such an environment is not easy. Flexible and dynamic financial planning and analysis (FP&A) can help firms to cope.