Transitioning from a scorekeeper to a trusted advisor is a major step for finance professionals. Moving towards FP&A 2.0 (otherwise known as Extended Planning and Analysis, or xP&A) involves creating value for the business beyond traditional forecasts and budget management.
But how do you create value and help the business capitalize on trends through financial planning and analysis?
Access to an enterprise-wide single source of truth helps your team define the KPIs that inform your rolling forecast. With access to the same data that employees use in revenue-producing business units, your team creates more opportunities to notice and take advantage of trends without hesitation.
With the right tools and processes, finance teams are in a unique position to see opportunities that enhance market share, customer acquisition, and product positioning. Analyzing data with sales and marketing teams fosters stronger collaboration, making it easier for functional areas of the business to monetize trends.
Let’s look at some ways xP&A creates newfound flexibility, collaboration, and value across the enterprise.
Processes Designed to Leverage Opportunities
Tracking KPIs is about more than just reporting results and progress. By measuring the right KPIs, your team gets a credible way to take advantage of new opportunities while minimizing risk.
Maintaining a single source of truth with BI tools makes it easy to monitor ongoing success with trends the business capitalizes on. For example, analyzing the data alongside burgeoning industry trends may lead your business to try shifting billing or payment terms.
Looking at the trends that may drive revenue and tracking new KPIs with a key stakeholder in another business unit makes it easier to incorporate capital and strategic projects into your rolling forecast.
By automating aspects of your planning and analysis, your team has more time to spend reviewing new opportunities and communicating with other business units. Ultimately, spending less time on time-consuming manual processes empowers finance professionals to spend more time in a value-driven advising role.
Strengthening Collaboration Across the Enterprise
Creating partnerships between teams offers FP&A 2.0 advisors more opportunities to understand priorities across the enterprise and make decisions based on what drives the business. A better grasp of those priorities leads to rolling forecasts that incorporate industry trends and ensure business units have the resources they need to access opportunities.
The non-finance people your FP&A team are advising are just as crucial to creating value. Better collaboration improves employee experience and reducing silos leads to more innovative work. Connecting the people in your organization creates an empowerment culture, where people are heard and their value is acknowledged.
Listening closely to the needs of different business units helps strengthen rolling forecasts and offers opportunities to test new tactics that promote revenue growth. This can help larger enterprises capitalize on trends and compete with more nimble and agile startups, ultimately securing higher market share and stabilizing positioning.
Facilitating Value Creation with the Right Tools
Acknowledging the drivers in your business is challenging when different teams use disparate tools to measure success. An enterprise-wide platform like Power BI plays a critical role in fostering collaboration and optimizing processes that simplify tracking business performance.
Without a comprehensive platform and process automation, finance teams aren’t equipped with the same opportunity to provide leadership. Putting the data they need at their fingertips allows teams to run real-time reports and make rapid decisions that drive value for the business.
Without those self-sufficient analysis capabilities, FP&A professionals may be stuck spending hours in clunky, antiquated tools like Excel to get similar results. Access to a wider range of data helps analysis experts see what’s driving business success in a whole new way, even beyond the traditional KPIs they measure.
Using these tools to track customer happiness, employee satisfaction, and related metrics reveals opportunities to strengthen the business that don’t directly relate to revenue. This creates an opportunity to deliver on the true value of xP&A: where people, process, platform, and partnership come together to drive business value.
Enhancing Value Within Your Enterprise with xP&A
Data is a powerful tool that your teams should leverage to increase revenue, but only if your financial teams use it to enhance their roles as trusted advisors. Creating empathetic, people-first partnerships across the enterprise should be the first step of creating valuable rolling forecasts.
Opportunities arise at a moment’s notice, and making rapid decisions gives your enterprise the power to access even more revenue. Trends present huge possibilities for growing market share, improving positioning, and driving sales…but only if teams are empowered to seize opportunities and have the resources to support those decisions.
FP&A experts create the most value when they use enterprise-wide data to empower business units to make impactful decisions and successfully track the impact of those decisions. That’s where xP&A can really help your enterprise thrive.
Collectiv’s FP&A Visioning Program simplifies the transition to FP&A 2.0, helping Finance play a more impactful role in your enterprise. Contact us today to start leveraging more growth opportunities.
