The impact of FP&A trends on your finance department and organization

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When it comes to financial planning and analysis (FP&A), how mature is your organization? An easy check is to look at the role of your finance team: are they acting as number crunchers, or do they fulfill the role of trusted business partner? Current FP&A trends are empowering your finance department to live up to its full potential, benefiting your organization.

Increased maturity for increased benefits

Current FP&A trends are helping organizations to improve their analytical capabilities and maturity level, taking them from a basic or developing state where there are few formal processes and little collaboration to an advanced or leading state with integrated planning processes, real-time collaborative planning, and easy multi-dimensional scenario analysis.

Analytical maturity in practice

At the lowest maturity levels, organizations use scheduled planning across multiple Excel files, static models that rely on key people to manage them, and relatively small amounts of data. As the organization matures, planning becomes continuous and on-demand, with driver-based, dynamic models that simplify patterns facilitating interactions and integration across the organization, and data is on a much larger scale. And this brings dramatic benefits for the organization.

From Financial Controllers to Trusted Business Partners

Automation, improved processes, and increasing sophisticated tools are introducing, refining, and automating processes, integrating data and forecasting across the organization, and generating insights that support better decision making. This has changed the role of the finance department. Instead of acting as the organization’s financial controller, simply entering and checking data, the finance department can now be a strategist and influencer, advising people of all levels throughout the organization, from the CEO down.

Fast track your maturity with Apliqo

Apliqo from Cubewise offers out-of-the box solutions to support organizations improve their maturity level. As well as best practices, these solutions include the IBM Planning Analytics engine and UX for real-time collaboration, state-of-the-art, proven OLAP engine with scenario analysis, advanced analytic capabilities, KPI methodology, and more.

The FP&A trend towards Unified Performance Management

Unified Performance Management (UPM), where all funding models, including the finance models, are interlinked across all departments is the ultimate goal for many organizations. However, even with the benefits that UPM offers, it can be challenging to fully implement it, leading many organizations to turn to Cubewise for advice and guidance.

Take the next step

Are you interested in exploring how Apliqo and Cubewise can help your organization? Contact us to discuss your unique situation.

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