Among FP&A challenges understanding, explaining and forecasting revenues evolutions are one of the top items. It may be more or less difficult depending on the company business.
Budgeting no longer helps organisations to perform better. On the contrary. It prevents organisations from performing to their full potential, because given the level of volatility, uncertainty and ambiguity in the world only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know. “The future ain’t what it used to be”, as the American baseball player Yogi Berra once put it.
The idea of a budget is so core to financial wisdom that it’s one of the first lessons we learnt from our parents for keeping our finances (and lives) on track. Annual Budgeting exercises have been the norm in almost all companies, big and small, across the world for decades. However, in recent years, there has been a lot of news about companies, some very prominent headline-grabbing ones, doing away with their annual budgets and moving to a monthly rolling forecast-based system.
Is your most fancied FP&A RPA initiative not delivering the anticipated benefits? You are not alone. So, what are the most common pitfalls? And more importantly, how can you sidestep them and increase your odds of a successful RPA implementation?
Working at a local business unit often doesn’t give you access to sophisticated corporate systems to monitor performance. However, as a financial you are quickly immersed into daily operations, learning how things really work. A sample will be given of key indicators used to improve the cash forecast and position of a business unit.
In the age of metrics and measurement, what are we doing to measure the satisfaction or happiness of those involved in FP&A? When organizations have low employee engagement, they incur additional costs related to the overall drain on productivity, turn-over, etc.., but more importantly companies are missing out on the upside potential to grow and compete based on the creativity, innovation and hard-work invested by an engaged workforce.