A recent survey of FP&A leaders provided two key findings: Data is a significant challenge that keeps growing, and staffing is becoming more of a problem.

The survey revealed 48% of FP&A teams don't have appropriate staffing levels and 64% of FP&A staff don't have clear career progressions. Nearly 60% of FP&A data requires manual data manipulation; and upwards of 80% of FP&A tasks are somewhat or significantly done in offline databases and spreadsheets. This leaves staff spending too much time on repetitive manual tasks, and not enough time driving business insights and supporting decision making.

FP&A Managed Services is an option to accelerate your modern finance journey, giving rapid access to emerging technologies, skills and capabilities you need without the substantial upfront investment.

We help transform finance organizations from improving the efficiency of their finance processes to creating smart functions with intelligent workflows — capable of finding, connecting and analyzing data to uncover deep insights that can inform intelligent decisions. Our financial consultants partner with clients to advise and manage end-to-end processes.

Manual financial processes can work to stifle business growth. A specialist FP&A consulting team can help you avoid this by advising and deploying the best methodology to streamline your business’ digital transformation.

They can optimise your processes to empower automated data gathering and delivery services, and improve your workflows for making business decisions. They can help you to identify and deploy the right FP&A platform for your business’ needs, which will improve your data architecture and enable automation of your manual tasks.

You’ll be able to accelerate routine finance processes, forecast more frequently, and drive strategic improvements for business resilience.

One key function of client services is to help your business with its budgeting. This can occur at all levels of the business. It can be as granular as working with individual units and departments to plan annual budgets. Or as high level as consolidating individual team budgets into a larger organisational budget.

Their role is to help your business identify where it can optimise its spend, and deliver a plan to achieve this. And if you’re one of the 58% of mid-to-large-sized organisations still using Excel spreadsheets for budgeting, this is a game-changer in terms of data volume, accuracy, and efficiency.

Gathering the right data is important. But being able to accurately translate that data into useful and actionable business insight is far more valuable. External FP&A consulting teams will help your business to gather, collate, and translate your internal financial data into more accurate reports. Reports that are able to be understood at all levels of the business.

This can take the form of creating corporate financial reports for the Executive team, to enable better business planning. It can be drafting departmental reports to identify where resources are allocated, and where they can reign in costs. Or it can be as straightforward as creating sales reports to identify the best selling products or services, and which deliver the best ROI.

It’s all about using their expertise to leverage more concise data, and facilitate better decision making.

Interpreting your business data into accurate and insightful forecasts is also a critical role of FP&A strategy consulting teams. Engaging an external team to deliver this service adds objectivity to your forecasts.

Rather than getting bogged down in how things are always done, an external FP&A consultant can use an unbiased view to help your business plan operations more effectively. They can use historical data to compare against forecasts and budgets. They help you track performance variance, and identify areas for business improvement going forward. And they do all this with a fresh and impartial viewpoint.