Your path to business agility
Last year produced an amazing number of qualitative and quantitative recommendations for the FP&A professional. Early in 2013, Ventana Research and Financial Executive Research Foundation (FERF) published the first of its kind: New Benchmarks in Long-Range Planning. The comprehensive study spawned both an Executive Summary from Ventana Research and a complementary set of actionable recommendations...
In most companies, the financial component of FP&A has clearly-defined processes and roles. Although the process varies from company to company, each will have regular and repeatable processes by which to accommodate tasks, responsibilities, and deliverables. But what about the other attributes of “FP&A”? Has your organization established a repeatable process and expectation for using...
A Definitive Guide to the State of Long-Range Planning in 2013 Industry experts, practitioners, and Finance leaders have articulated their takeaways from the research in a variety of ways. This compilation of the best-of-the-best indicates an interest from both executives and practitioners as well as represents a practical and philosophical take on the comprehensive research....
When I was approached to write an article for Financial Executive magazine on the results of the 2013 Long-Range Planning Benchmark Study (conducted by FERF and Ventana Research), I was able to spend time with the data and think about the implications it presented to Finance and the annual budgeting process. As I began writing...
How One Cell Discredited the Way the World Measures the Ratio of Debt-to-GDP and What That Should Mean for Using Spreadsheets for Finance At every FP&A conference I have ever attended, the subject of spreadsheets comes up and those with a great argument for keeping them receive, what I perceive to be, the loudest applause. Usually...
Getting Executives Involved in Long-Range Planning and Benchmarking Your Company’s Long-Range Planning Process is the First Step Towards Improvement If you were given the opportunity to directly influence your company’s success, would you take it? Would you want to help on develop the plans, direction, and spending of your organization? Or would you avoid such...
Albert Einstein has been credited in saying, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If you are charged with some element of the annual budgeting process for your organization, such as capital planning, strategic planning, budgeting, and annual allocations, among others; chances are you’ve been inundated with spreadsheets, tab delimited...
As we start the fourth quarter, having just come back from the annual Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) national conference, it seems like an appropriate time to reflect on the trends of the last year. Read on for seven financial planning and analysis trends from 2012. Trend #1: The Rise of FP&A Within the finance...
In part one of this series, How to Use Annual Budgeting to Increase Total Shareholder Return I explained how most companies make minor changes in their budget allocations from year-to-year. I also referenced a recent McKinsey Quarterly study that found that over time, companies earned on average 30% higher annual total returns to shareholders by...
The link between a company’s strategy and the long-range planning process, which culminates in their annual budget, has always been, to put it nicely, a very loose one. For those of us close to the planning process, this has been a well-known problem for a long time. Yet we continue to be surprised when we...
