After her round of meetings with financial planning and analysis professionals across the globe, Larysa Melnychuk, managing director of the London FP&A Club, returned with plenty of stories and insights about the challenges they face.
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.
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.
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.
FP&A goes by many names. In Germany, it is called “Controlling”. From my previous visits to Germany, I know that German Controllers are different from Accountants: they are forward-looking, analytical and often very technical in their approaches. Recently, I got a great opportunity to learn how FP&A is evolving in Europe’s strongest economy.