There’s nothing quite as uncomfortable as having to change when you don’t want to. Or perhaps to a lesser extent of discomfort, having to change faster than you’d like to. In March and April, many companies wavered as they weighed the possibilities of what might transpire in the coming months of Summer 2020. Yet, in the recent Fall months, they’ve increasingly executed upon what they believed would be their new realities.
Hey there, I’m Carl Seidman and welcome to a different kind of statement. You know that business and finance are changing faster than you’ve ever experienced in your lifetime. And they are not going to slow down any time soon.
Financial planning entails effectively defining and timing future resource deployments. Scenario planning is a technique used in FP&A to help guide companies through considerable uncertainty, contemplating various paths of possibilities. Despite our best attempts, our forecasts will have inherent errors; actual results deviating from the figures we had anticipated hitting.
We cannot know, with certainty, how the future will unfold for our companies. We are not fortune-tellers. Forecasts will almost always be wrong because they assumptions we make about the future will be incorrect and frequently change.
Non-financial managers bring much-needed operations focus into workplaces. Yet, because these managers typically lack strong financial acumen, it’s sometimes difficult for them to make strong business cases when they haven’t clearly identified the financial benefits.