By Vena, in partnership with BPM Partners

Executive Summary

Get insight into finance teams’ key challenges and priorities across several topics such as navigating the economy, people management, organizational processes and technology.

These days we’re all reminded that the only certainty is continuing uncertainty. As a result, finance teams have become more integral to their business than ever, generating accurate forecasts and profitability reports more frequently than in the past, to help stakeholders and leaders make the right calls. To step up to this challenge, finance teams are breaking out of the confines of their departments, growing and upskilling their teams, and embracing new technologies–but with room for improvement. In partnership with BPM Partners, Vena surveyed 218 finance leaders to uncover what’s driving their strategic planning in 2025.

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By IBM Institute for Business Value

Executive Summary

The expectation to be both the guardian of stability and agent of transformation has elevated the stakes and the opportunity for the CFO and the finance function. To tackle this paradox of responsibilities and drive value through the organization, CFOs need to optimize their own potential and that of their teams. To excel will require new approaches, new tools, new perspective, new organizational constructs, and skills—especially related to data—as well as discipline in using them.

This study examines five CFO success factors and provides an action guide:

• Strategic focus
• Organizational agility
• Data-centricity
• Redefined talent
• Intelligent workflows

Introduction

When change is at its most intense, people long for certainty. For enterprises, this traditionally has meant turning to an officer charged with maintaining stability, fiscal soundness, and  adherence to standards: the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). In this role, the CFO brings calm, perspective, and a comprehensive understanding of the big picture by being grounded in specific  details and tangible realities. CFOs are equipped with a toolbox of levers that they can use to deliver outcomes. And reliable outcomes are exactly what executives want in a time of change.

In the modern tech-fueled economy, a premium has been placed on organizational agility and transformation. Both these capabilities took on heightened importance as the pandemic swept the  globe and disrupted systems—not just for weeks and months, but for the foreseeable future. CFOs have again been thrust into the spotlight to help here, turned to by Chief Executive Officers  (CEOs), boards, and investors more than any other C-suite role for guidance, insight, and action. According to our most recent CEO Study, CEOs view the CFO as playing the most crucial role in  their organizations over the next 2 to 3 years.

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Link to full article: Strategic Intelligence: CFOs as architects of action and champions of change

By IMA (Institute of Management Accountants)

Executive Summary

Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) is a decision-making platform that includes reporting and analysis, planning and budgeting, forecasting, and financial modeling, and is a big part of the management accounting body of knowledge. This SMA provides the principles of effective FP&A organized into 12 principles and how to prioritize them, and details what the best-run organizations do differently with FP&A. It also discusses the role of technology, the competencies needed, how to get started, and how to “sell” the need for FP&A improvement to top management. Appendix 1 provides survey evidence supporting the 12 principles.

In general, the best-performing organizations take a more rigorous approach to FP&A:
• They have tightly integrated all the components of FP&A.
• They have merged operational and financial planning.
• They track progress of initiatives designed to improve the operational numbers just as
closely as they monitor financial results.
• They hold people accountable for delivering results, including linking pay with
performance.
• They translate strategy into action and make sure initiatives are properly resourced
and accounted for in the budget.
• They are agile enough to make course adjustments when they identify the need.

Introduction

Few processes within the purview of a CFO have so much potential to create—or destroy—business value than FP&A. How a company allocates its resources will impact its success or its failure. Even if an organization has the right strategy, if the budget does not reflect those priorities and properly fund tangible initiatives, the strategy will likely not succeed. Beyond money, if people are not actually spending their time executing the plan, it simply will not happen. Executing the plan requires that people know what the plan is and their role in executing it. While aspects of FP&A may seem routine, such as budgeting or monthly variance reporting, they are all links in the chain of the value creation process.

Unfortunately, many companies are not achieving the full potential of their FP&A activities. A study by American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) found that just 40% of finance executives from large organizations rated their FP&A as effective. Two-thirds of the executives said that their finance teams are too busy doing basic financial management duties such as periodic forecasting and actual-vs.-budget analysis. KPMG has published a report suggesting that it is the “financial” in financial planning and analysis that reduces the effectiveness of the FP&A function. Too much focus on forecasting and budgeting within a fiscal year with an emphasis on meeting short-term targets takes time away from the “planning and analysis” that is needed to help the company develop and execute its strategy.

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Link to full article: https://www.bpmpartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/SMA-Key-Principles-of-Best-Practice-FPA.pdf

Executive Summary

“Graphical excellence is the well-designed presentation of interesting data — a matter of substance, of statistics, and of design. Graphical excellence consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision and efficiency. Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest amount space.” − Edward R. Tufte

Financial planning and analysis professionals are increasingly using charts and graphs to visualize data, interact with information, and present it to senior management and the board to tell stories and drive important conversations.

Graphical information is more intuitively absorbed in our minds and can capture large amounts of data in a much more succinct format, allowing FP&A to spot and show trends, patterns and anomalies more effectively. Using graphics, finance professionals can tell better stories, pinpoint action items, and create effective dashboards that allow management to see the business at a glance. These dashboards need to be tailored to audiences — more high-level for the board, more detailed for operations. However, they should all draw on the same set of data, or version of the truth.

FP&A professionals are only beginning to use high-level visualization to interact more effectively with their data, perform their own analyses, validate hypotheses, ask deeper questions, and prepare presentations for senior management. They can do so at increasing rates of speed, which means more time to think and analyze, more dynamic, real-time analysis and reporting, and less time spent collecting data and struggling with creating charts.

New tools are emerging that allow analysts to use data visualization to dig into patterns and identify problem areas quickly, often tied directly to the company’s performance database. Going forward, interactive data tools will allow finance professionals to not only confirm hypotheses, but ask additional questions and continue to interact with the data to explore new areas, thus providing continuous feedback to management.

As the use of data visualization becomes more widely used by finance, which many say is lagging compared to areas like marketing and sales, it will unleash a greater power of analytics and enable professionals to deal with an increasing amount of data.

Introduction: The Trend

Survey shows more finance professionals are looking to data visualization to help solve problems, identify patterns and anomalies, and understand what’s driving their organizational performance.

The trend toward greater use of visualization among FP&A professionals is still growing. “A lot of them are still focused on numbers,” said Craig Schiff, president and CEO of BPM Partners, a vendor-neutral advisory services firm specializing in business performance management (BPM) and business intelligence solutions. However, the data from the 2014 BPM Pulse Survey of finance professionals shows the desire for change is strong. Asked if they require data visualization beyond typical charts or graphs offered in Excel, 40 percent of the finance professionals surveyed responded that they do. “That’s a large and growing number,” Schiff noted.

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Link to full article: https://www.bpmpartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/FPAGuideDataVisualizationvF.pdf