I’ve never been one to enjoy large networking events. For years, I’d gone to conferences, masterminds, fundraisers, and roundtables. And while these in-person meetings and experiences allowed me to meet new people, they rarely facilitated deeper connections.
There are a lot of avoidable problems in the finance field and I’d like to address just a few within the context of financial and business modeling. Maybe you can relate and my bringing attention to them will alleviate or eliminate some of your frustrations.
A few weeks ago, I was a guest speaker for three student groups at Big Ten universities. The young people who participated were hungry — curious about how to navigate their careers, what kind of companies to work with, what finance and FP&A professionals do and the future of the profession.
When a University of Chicago professor I admire wrote a book about artificial intelligence (AI), I was eager to read it. An accomplished authority on what’s next in the world of technology, Nick Polson is educating the world on how humans and computers will work together. Being in a field that relies on human intelligence…
Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professionals are responsible for the forecasting, planning, and analytical processes that support an organization’s financial health and future. Going beyond the record-keeping of an accountant, FP&A provides critical support to the executive team and often reports directly to the Director of Finance or CFO.
In the AFP 2020 pre-conference workshop, FORECASTING IN UNCERTAIN TIMES, Carl Seidman, principal of Seidman Financial, provided attendees with both implementation-ready and theoretical approaches for improving forecasting accuracy.
Here we are – the beginning of a new year and nearly 12 months after the start of COVID. Some of you haven’t heard from me since the late Fall and after a busy end to 2020, I wanted to share some of my musings about where we are and where we’ve come from. I’ve put my thoughts together and reflected on how my attitudes toward work and life have changed and how they’ve stayed the same.
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.