Manage Your Company’s Financial Health with Our FP&A Services
Enable smart decision making, improve financial control, and ultimately lead a better business.
WHAT IS FINANCIAL PLANNING AND ANALYSIS (FP&A) and WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
Financial planning and analysis (FP&A), also referred to as strategic finance, play an integral role in businesses helping to budget, forecast, and analyze finances.
Financial planning is the process of assessing the current financial situations of a business to establish the business’s short-term and long-term goals and create a strategic plan to achieve the company’s goals. Therefore, financial planning is not a product, but a process.
FP&A supports senior management, helping them forecast the company’s financials and operating performance over the next quarter, as well as the next few years—often starting with a projected P&L (profit and loss statement).
FP&A helps management:
- Analyze the results of previous strategic plans and investments, and predict what might need to change within the entire business unit.
- Build budgets, both on a business-wide level or by department.
- Create and update forecasts of the business’ future analytics and expected performance.
The company’s executive management team can make the most informed decisions to propel the company forward. Despite their strategic importance, many companies don’t have or fully utilize FP&A. In fact, according to Gartner, “Only 3% of companies have strategic, operational and financial planning processes that are fully aligned and integrated.
If you aren’t currently utilizing FP&A at your business, you may be missing out on significant financial insights that would allow you to better plan your financial activity from HR to operations. There are numerous benefits to using FP&A to inform your business decisions, but here are several standouts:
- Better business decisions: Through FP&A you can streamline your financial decisions by having your data insights in one place, instead of scattered across systems. This allows your leadership team to have the information they need to drive decisions more efficiently so that your business can act on its data and not react.
- Sustained business growth: With FP&A, you can model business projections and outcomes from investing in sales to marketing, recruiting and other areas. These scenario models can help you optimize your growth by allowing you to track and plan various situations, so you know which outcomes fit your business goals the best. By giving you the tools to plan ahead, you can plan for sustained growth.
- Increased productivity: When your business planning processes are concentrated in one singular area, whether that is through software or team, it allows for higher productivity levels due to the limited interactions required to analyze data findings. If using just software, these levels can be even higher due to decreased staffing requirements.
- Effective and efficient management of cash flow: Another importance of financial planning for business is that it helps management to effectively and efficiently manage cash inflows and outflows. It will help your business to plan your expenditure based on the expected cash inflows. It will help you to envisage the shortage or surplus of cash in your business and plan the necessary actions.
- Financial performance measurement: Financial planning also helps to evaluate performance by comparing the financial standards or plans with the actual outcome. You must evaluate the outcome of your plan at every stage of your planning to measure the company’s progress in achieving the established goals. This will help your business to take corrective actions when necessary.
- Risk management: In today’s world, there are many risk factors that your company should avoid at all costs. Financial frauds, theft, and other similar risks can lead to devastating consequences for any company. US businesses can lose 5% of their revenues just to scams. Financial planning is one of the most effective ways to avoid such situations effectively. You may think that financial risks and crises are unpredictable. However, through proper planning and analysis involved in a financial plan, you can prepare for such situations.
SOME OF OUR FINANCIAL PLANNING AND ANALYSIS (FP&A) SERVICES
- Fully integrated financial modeling to support key decision making
- Cost/Benefit Analysis
- Business Case Development
- Long-Term Strategic Planning
- Forecasting, including balance sheet, cash flow and P&L forecasts
- Budgeting, including establishment of ground-up budgeting process & methodology and template development
- Pricing, profitability & gross margin analysis
- Evaluation of salesforce effectiveness & compensation plans
- KPI development, benchmarking & competitive analysis
- Assessment of effectiveness of Finance team & process improvement
- Development of cost accounting standards for manufacturing companies
OUR FP&A PROCESS
