In order to help businesses navigate today’s most pressing issues and trends in financial planning, we’re bringing you curated information and materials to help you respond each week. This week’s articles highlight news in financial planning as well as what experts are saying on the matter.
1. Workday Adaptive Planning: 3 key steps on your journey to business agility
Throughout the world, businesses of every size are feeling firsthand the impacts of instability. In a time of uncertainty, surviving and thriving comes down to how promptly your business can identify disruptive changes and proactively respond to them.
That’s not so easy when your business is mired in static planning—characterized by long planning cycles, immediately obsolete plans, siloed efforts, and hard-to-find errors. Manual, spreadsheet-based planning, budgeting, and forecasting may have worked well enough in a more predictable age. But as we’re discovering, that age is long gone.
Even traditional market forces have proven challenging. Technological advances, ever-increasing customer expectations, and smarter, data-driven decision-making put pressure on finance teams to find new ways to operate with agility.
But how do you plan in a way that allows you to respond to such events, from the predictable to the unlikely?
The answer begins—and ends—with active planning.
2. FP&A Trends: The Operational Budget: An Advanced Zero-Based Budget
This is the last article in a series of eight articles about the Operational Budget (OB) and its associated Operational Income Statement (OIS). These articles have described the significant enhancements the OB and OIS provide to the traditional budget and related financial processes and techniques.
3. CFO.com: Five Lessons for CFOs As We Approach 2021
While many companies are still dealing with the acute impacts of the economic and social disruption of 2020, innovative companies will apply what they’ve learned to excel in 2021. Here are five ways that companies can build resilience and weather future challenges while being better positioned to capitalize on emerging opportunities.
4. CFODIVE: Large gulf between CFOs and reality on real-time capabilities, survey finds
Nearly 70% of CFOs say a real-time financial model will be key to responding to any crises that arise next year.
Rising interest rates, more pandemic-related economic stress, and a recession top their list of concerns, alongside hiring and retaining talent.
“Not only do finance leaders need to outmaneuver uncertainty, but [they need to] leverage an intelligent finance operating model … to give them the speed to make the enterprise succeed,” Christian Campagna, head of Accenture’s CFO and Enterprise Value network, said.
5. Deloitte: Looking beyond the horizon
THE COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare many of the long-standing vulnerabilities and risks lurking in organizations’ supply chains. In some cases, it has caused companies to take a hard look at their processes and their business models. In others, it has opened new opportunities for innovation, growth, and competitive advantage in the postpandemic world. Overall, it has demonstrated the power of interconnected, digital supply networks (DSNs) to enable organizations to anticipate, sense, and respond to unexpected changes and minimize their impacts.
Thanks for checking in this week! We’ll be back next Thursday with more updates in financial planning. In the meantime, subscribe to our blog to get our posts directly in your inbox.