The Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) world continues to transform from what I like to call Financial Planning & Reporting (FP&R)—an emphasis on reporting—whereas FP&A emphasizes analysis. The old days of being a former accountant who crunches numbers no longer cuts it. With how quickly things change in today’s world just looking back at explaining…
Zero-based budgeting has been the unwanted stepchild of the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) world for decades. Chief Financial Officers would lie to their friends about how they budget and say they do cool things like rolling forecasts, beyond budgeting or at the very least incremental budgeting at cocktail parties but NOT zero-based budgeting which was…
Your firm just completed a multi-million dollar Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) project to consolidate the information system resources of two business entities. The project is seven months late with cost overruns of $800,000. Fingers are pointing everywhere as to who is to blame for the delay and extra costs. Management would now like to…
“People … operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.” Michael Lewis Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Analytics married to Big Data these days must appear to many CEOs as a corporate fountain of youth, capable of shedding…
“A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength.” Michel de Montaigne, French Renaissance Philosopher & Writer As finance holds the reins of the 2017 financial plan process, having a great deal of influence how the plan activities are presented and executed, it might be a good…
“BUSINESS IS ALL ABOUT RISK TAKING AND MANAGING UNCERTAINTIES AND TURBULENCE.” BY GAUTAM ADANI, BUSINESS TYCOON Late this September, the movie, Deepwater Horizon will appear in theaters. The high level of interest in this release can be recognized, with over five million movie trailer view from YouTube. What could engage so many viewers in this…
Repeating, predictable patterns in data over a period of time, typically 12-months or more, are commonly characterized as seasonality. It’s certainly not the seasonal Fall or Autumn collection of the Vogue fashion trends which will never be repeated on the runway, but it’s the same predictable pattern every period. Since the oscillating highs and lows…
Serious boss looking at camera with his two employees sitting near by. I sometimes envy my former classmates that went into equity analysis. When they build financial forecasting models it may be used by buy-side analysts as best guesses of what a company’s sales or earnings may be next quarter or next year but…
Periodic variance analysis has got to be one of the hardest jobs in Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A). Every month you go out to the various operations teams and shared services leads and ask them why their forecast is not on budget or most recent forecast. The answers are almost always lacking in detail and…