Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) play a crucial role by supporting major decisions taken by the CEO, the CFO, and the Board of Directors through budgeting, forecasting, and analysis.
Competition in the market landscape has intensified the trend toward financial planning and analysis. This has intensified cost pressures and liquidity concerns across many industry verticals. In this article, let’s take a closer look into how FP&A is used to strengthen the forecasting abilities of cash flow and working capital management.
As it offers financial leaders the ability to foresee risks and tap opportunities on the go. Building financial models to project long-term growth can help identify the impacting business factors. It presents a systematic, strategy-oriented approach to the management of corporate performance. This process of managing a company includes all financial strategies, such as planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and analysis.
What is Financial Planning & Analysis?
The CFO’s core function is Financial Planning and Analysis. A company’s FP&A team focuses on all strategic and operational activities, such as business planning, management, and control.
Financial planning is the basis for any company’s economic success, which involves formulating detailed plans based on specific financial objectives. Facilitating all financial aspects of the company to be recorded, analyzed, and planned by the controller.
The controller analyzes past events and the actual situation and compares them with the target situation based on specific financial objectives with financial forecasting. FP&A team then builds up the financial planning of future revenues and expenditures based on this analysis.
The financial concept provides a record of all objectives and results that can be derived from the financial planning process.
Benefits of FP&A
Improved Performance predictability & Impact
The development of the capability to better manage business partnering typically occurs in two phases. You can start by focusing on performance predictability, which is the ability to forecast future financial results both short-term and long-term.
In the second phase, FP&A is expanding its footprint and varies by business based on how it is operating. The FP&A function’s analytics become embedded in all levels of an organization, including sales, operations, manufacturing, R&D, legal, IT, and finance itself.
With the advent of disruptive technologies, including data visualization and natural language reporting, FP&A teams can now analyze and visualize their data more efficiently and present the results in more intuitive and accessible formats.
Earlier, FP&A was focused on planning and reporting tools, supported by spreadsheets and presentation tools. Financial leaders encourage firms to utilize these new tools as the technological possibilities are increasing.
Create the FP&A Capability
The focus of your FP&A effort must shift from increasing FP&A’s capacity to assessing the capabilities of each member of the team. The FP&A function should strive to build collective capability by recruiting and retaining employees with distinct skill sets and providing them with continuous development opportunities.
Moreover, the recruiting should not only address its traditional core competencies, but also enhance its strategic decision support, analytical insights, and overall leadership.
Integration leads insight
Interacting frequently and cohesively with the business, FP&A plays a key role in the success of the organization. CFOs and FP&A leaders want FP&A to not only cooperate with the business but also be fully integrated.
To accomplish this, it is necessary to establish stronger relationships with various business levels and increase awareness of how FP&A can add value.
FP&A leads a business to accelerated performance and performs a pivotal role in supporting collaboration. We will continuously reinforce this evolutionary process as encouraged by the CFO and FP&A leaders.
An integrated model that allows FP&A to unleash its full potential can contribute real value to the enterprise.
Best Practices: Understanding The workflows
The FP&A Analyst is responsible for the processes ensuring the financial health of an organization as well as strategies that support these processes. The essential functions of an FP&A Analyst include:
Establishing systems and processes regularly
Analyze and forecast the short-term cash flow
Routine internal control analysis
The creation and analysis of financial models and simulations
Forecasting the company’s cash flow and financial projections
Implementing growth strategies monthly, quarterly, and annually
Why FP&A matters to your Business?
Strategic partners are essential for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams to become more effective in business. FP&A to help steer the business through complex, volatile, and often changing business conditions as well as to adapt to new business models.
Startups should map out their process, and identify risks, opportunities, and potential breakdown points. By adopting novel technologies we can address the challenges now and reap their benefits long into the future.
With rapid access to real-time information analytics, FP&A services are often delivered in consumer-grade experiences, rather than static spreadsheets that require hours of manual preparation and manipulation. Also, it will serve as a single point of truth for information that will assist in making business decisions.
How Spice Route can help transform your Financial Planning & Analysis?
Connect with our experienced practitioners and financial experts to discover innovative approaches to make smarter business decisions. Spice Route has a dedicated team to make your budgeting and forecasting process sustainable and more accurate.
Our FP&A leaders drive performance and keep budgets on track. We ensure to provide operational and enterprise-wide decision support to highly complex business structures through our FP& A teams.
Accessing the FP&A transformation, your startup business can stay ahead of the curve when it comes to a high-quality financial data environment and impactful analytics for efficient decision-making.
Feel free to contact us at info@spiceroutefinance.com if you are curious to find out how FP&A can transform your business’s way of work.