Owning and operating a business comes with generating and tracking large amounts of financial data. Larger companies may have a separate division in their finance department that manages and interprets this data, which is called the financial planning and analysis team (FP&A). For smaller to mid-sized organizations, the CFO may perform these tasks, or they may utilize FP&A software to analyze the data. The main function of an FP&A team or software is to assist with the financial planning, budgeting and financial forecasting processes and help leadership make important business decisions through data insights.
If you aren’t currently utilizing FP&A at your business, you may be missing out on significant financial insights that would allow you to better plan your financial activity from HR to operations. There are numerous benefits to using FP&A to inform your business decisions, but here are several standouts:
- Faster and stronger business decisions. Through FP&A you can streamline your financial decisions by having your data insights in one place, instead of scattered across systems. This allows your leadership team to have the information they need to drive decisions more efficiently so that your business can act on its data and not react.
- Sustained business growth. With FP&A, you can model business projections and outcomes from investing in sales to marketing, recruiting and other areas. These scenario models can help you optimize your growth by allowing you to track and plan various situations, so you know which outcomes fit your business goals the best. By giving you the tools to plan ahead, you can plan for sustained growth.
- Increased productivity. When your business planning processes are concentrated in one singular area, whether that is through software or team, it allows for higher productivity levels due to the limited interactions required to analyze data findings. If using just software, these levels can be even higher due to decreased staffing requirements.
- FP&A software removes the need for countless spreadsheets and reports. This frees up the time spent creating documents and allows your team to use it to be more strategic with the data findings.
FP&A has become a crucial part of operating efficient financial practices and isn’t going away anytime soon. As with most data trends, FP&A is continuously evolving. Traditionally, FP&A has leveraged historical data to drive results but with the enormous amount of data available in today’s tech-forward world, it is moving away from retroactive analysis and moving toward providing future predictions. Predicting the future seems far-fetched, but in reality, it’s happening now with the use of robust software programs like Jirav.
At BerganKDV, we partner with Jirav to provide our accounting services clients access to the business planning and forecasting technology they need to drive meaningful results and develop an efficient financial strategy. If you want to learn more about utilizing FP&A at your business and how Jirav can help, our team at BerganKDV would be happy to assist. Contact us to learn more about our accounting services and technology solutions.
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