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Congrats on your score!
Your FP&A is Developing.
Your FP&A is developing, and you’re making great strides. Next step? Being consistent in your processes and automating tedious tasks to focus on strategic impact. Keep reading for more insights on where to go from here.
Grow your FP&A prowess
At this stage, you should look to standardize annual planning processes, implement advanced modeling techniques like scenario planning and modeling, and automate non-value-added tasks to focus time on strategic analysis and decision support.
Define annual planning
Document your annual planning process, including activities like data gathering, forecasting, budgeting, and reporting. Create templates, formats, and timelines for each activity, define roles and responsibilities, and implement SOPs.
Explore advanced modeling
Use rolling forecasts to provide better projections, scenario planning to model potential outcomes, and advanced analytics or ML to improve forecasting accuracy.
Leverage a full driver-based model
Include key factors driving your business, not just past data, to make more accurate and flexible forecasts. This helps finance and operations work better together, improving decision-making and planning.
The guiding principles of strategic finance
Foresight
The proactive anticipation of future financial trends and challenges, enable companies to make informed decisions and strategic plans. This principle emphasizes the use of data analytics, scenario planning, and forecasting techniques to predict potential outcomes and mitigate risks.
Alignment
Financial strategies and goals should closely align with your business objectives and operational plans. Strategic leaders foster collaboration across departments, ensuring everyone works towards a common mission.
Storytelling
Storytelling in FP&A transforms complex financial data and analyses into compelling narratives that stakeholders can easily understand and act upon. Effective storytelling bridges the gap between financial experts and non-financial stakeholders, facilitating better decision-making.
Balance
FP&A involves managing the trade-offs between short-term financial performance and long-term strategic goals. Careful evaluation of risks and opportunities is a heavy weight on a finance leader’s shoulders. By striving for balance, organizations can navigate financial complexities while achieving both immediate and future objectives.
Bookmark these FP&A
and finance resources
Budgeting & Forecasting
Rolling forecasts: Definition, how to make one, and when to use them
Learn how to unlock the potential of rolling forecasts by harnessing their agility, adaptability, and accuracy to drive informed business decisions.
Building a Foolproof Operating Budget
Discover how to create an operating budget that’s scalable and guaranteed to help your company reach its goals.
Budgeting & Forecasting
6 biggest headaches for FP&A teams (and how to fix them)
Dive into the six biggest challenges FP&A teams face and discover quick, efficient solutions to overcome them.