The final forecast is easy to share. The work behind it is harder to see. How does Finance gather inputs from across the business? Which version has been approved? What happens when management asks for a new scenario?
For CFOs and finance leaders, the question is where that work is going. Are your planning and forecasting processes giving your team enough control and time to analyse the numbers? Or is too much effort spent collecting, checking and updating them?
Where planning and forecasting effort builds up
Think about the last forecast your team delivered. Did departmental inputs arrive in a consistent format? Could you trace a change back to its source? Was it clear which version had been reviewed and approved?
And when management asked, “What happens if we change this assumption?”, how much work did it take to show the impact on the P&L, balance sheet and cash flow?
These are practical questions for any team responsible for financial planning and forecasting. A process can deliver the numbers on time while still requiring a great deal of checking, follow-up and manual work along the way. Seeing where that effort accumulates is a useful first step towards improving it.
See where your FP&A process stands
The areas covered by the FP&A Reality Check
The assessment looks at three connected parts of your FP&A process:
- Scenarios and impact: How readily Finance can model an alternative and explain what it means for financial performance.
- Data and inputs: How actuals, departmental contributions and assumptions reach your planning model, and how much checking they require.
- Versions and workflows: How your team manages submissions, approvals and changes, including whether a figure can be traced back to its source.
Your answers produce a personal report with a result for each area and an overall planning maturity level: Manual, Structured, Connected or Integrated. The report also includes recommendations based on where your process stands today.
Your planning maturity result and next steps
The value is in knowing where to start. If inputs take the most effort, you may want to review how data is collected and validated. If versions are difficult to track, approvals and ownership may need more attention. If scenarios take too long to prepare, the priority may be how assumptions connect to financial outcomes.
Your result gives you something concrete to discuss with your team: what works well today, what creates unnecessary work and which change could make the next forecast easier to prepare and explain.