3 tips for reducing the hidden costs of FP&A

All too often, the return on investment of FP&A projects only encompasses productivity gains within the corporate finance team and ignore the massive amount of effort and cost that lies submerged in the business units. According to new research by business advisory firm CEB, it is this that is preventing companies from realizing the full potential of recent investments in FP&A improvements. In a global survey of 138 FP&A directors, CEB found that four in five companies realized less than half of their potential productivity and cost savings from FP&A initiatives because they failed to consider that the majority of workload is manual and time-consuming.

The magnitude of this hidden workload sometimes presents a challenge to an FP&A team intent on improving corporate agility and budget accuracy by increasing the frequency of forecasts or the level of detail in a chart of accounts. Here are some tips for keeping your colleagues across the business with you every step of the way.

1. Engage with the business

Undoubtedly, there is a lot of budgeting and forecasting work that is done for controls and assurance rather than for decision-making and resource allocation. This is all too obvious to those in sales, commercial, and operational roles, who are responsible for running the day-to-day business. According to the FP&A directors CEB surveyed, only 21 percent of internal business stakeholders say budgeting is a valuable activity, and just 35 percent of stakeholders say forecasting is a valuable activity.

The only way to overcome such resistance is to involve stakeholders from across the business in your project at the earliest opportunity and ensure that you create a win-win situation. That means producing forecasts that give the action-oriented outputs they need to manage their part of the business, such as predictions of future staffing needs or identifying potential capacity problems.

2. Minimize their workload

You also need to make a conscious effort to minimize the workload that more frequent forecasting can place on the business. There are numerous ways to achieve that:

• Focus efforts on forecasting line items that are both material and variable. That typically means revenue, large amounts of variable expense, and discretionary spending. Everything else is less important and can be forecast far less frequently.
• Some line items in a forecast are more important than others; therefore, some need to be forecasted in considerable detail while others can simply be aggregated. For instance, you might ask for a detailed forecast of every pack size of fast-moving products, but not for slower-moving product groups.
• Build driver-based models that leverage operational data that is readily available, using rules to convert inputs into the financial view you need. Adopting such an approach produces the action-orientated information that business executives need—making forecasting a rapid, light-touch process that minimizes workload.

3. Use technology to deliver local flexibility

Collaborate with business unit leaders to build budgeting and forecasting models that incorporate rich, relevant operational data. This can considerably reduce waste and produce the actionable insight needed to drive local decision-making. Gone are the standardized input templates that are simply consolidated by the corporate FP&A team. Instead, there is a series of interlinked models with logic and inputs tailored to the needs of individual business units, but which all consolidate back to the holistic financial view.

Self-managed planning platforms, such as Anaplan, make it quick and easy to customize budgeting and forecasting models to the needs of individual business units. This can never be possible with spreadsheets or legacy solutions. A cloud-based planning platform is essential if you want to tackle the entire cost of FP&A processes and not just that bit above the water line in the corporate finance team. Watch our recorded webinar, Transcend silos and truly integrate business plans with enterprise-wide planning, and hear how to improve planning and collaboration abilities across functions and prepare your business for growth.