FP&A Decision Rights Framework: How CFOs Turn Financial Analysis Into Action
An FP&A decision rights framework helps CFOs clarify who recommends, approves, executes, and revisits material financial decisions.
Tag Archive for: Finance Business Partnering
Forecast Assumption Ownership: How CFOs Stop Planning Surprises
Learn how CFOs assign forecast assumption ownership, improve FP&A accountability, and catch operational changes before they become financial surprises.
Budget Variance Analysis: How FP&A Finds What Actually Matters
There is a particular kind of monthly Finance meeting where every variance gets treated like it has committed a crime. Travel is $8,000 over budget. Explain it. Software is $11,000 under. Explain it. Office supplies are $3,700 over. Apparently we need closure. Meanwhile, revenue is $2.4 million below plan and somehow we’ve allocated roughly the […]
What Is FP&A? A Practical Guide to Financial Planning & Analysis
FP&A has a branding problem. Tell someone you work in Accounting and they have a general idea what you do. Tell them you’re in Sales and they definitely have an idea what you do. Tell someone you work in Financial Planning & Analysis and there is usually a small pause. Then: “So…finance?” Yes. Technically. That […]
Driver-Based Forecasting: How to Find the Right Business Drivers
I get suspicious when someone tells me they have 47 drivers in their forecast. At that point, I don’t think you have drivers. I think you have a very complicated spreadsheet. There is a difference. Driver-based forecasting is one of those FP&A ideas that sounds almost impossible to disagree with. Instead of taking last year’s […]
Financial Scenario Planning: How FP&A Can Build Scenarios That Actually Help Management
I have trust issues with scenario models. Not because I don’t like scenarios. I do. I’ve built plenty of them. I’ve also sat in meetings where we had so many scenarios that I started to suspect we were using Excel to avoid making a decision. You know the meeting I’m talking about. Base case. Upside […]
Building FP&A From Absolute Zero: Katelyn Stienen on Budgets, Business Partnership, and the Stories Behind the Numbers
What would you do if you walked into a five-year-old company with more than 170 legal entities, roughly 10,000 budget lines, no FP&A planning system, department heads who had never worked with a structured P&L, and tax rules capable of changing while you were still building the budget? I think I’d need coffee first. Probably […]
Sarah Schlott
FP&A consulting, forecasting, accounting support and finance strategy for CFOs and growing finance teams.