Carl Seidman is a trusted business advisor specializing in financial planning and analysis (FP&A), business strategy, and finance transformation. He coaches and advises FP&A professionals at Fortune 500 corporations and middle-market companies, helping establish best practices, processes and sustainable business models. At the same time, Carl brings finance professionals greater control over their careers by helping them build their skills while eliminating time-wasting activities and mistakes.
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.
Ten to fifteen years ago, I was a fraud examiner and forensic accountant. I was responsible for examining financial mischief. This included cash flow mismanagement, inventory manipulation, check kiting, and outright theft.
Business intelligence software is easy-to-use, affordable, and offers an alternative to running filtered pivot tables and pivot charts in Excel. The incorporation of data visualization platforms, such as Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI, are revolutionizing the ways in which financial information is presented.
Financial planning & analysis, or more commonly referred to as FP&A, is a business discipline focused on financial management and strategic alignment. To put it more simply, if a CFO’s position were broken down into its many parts and those parts were translated into separate job descriptions, most of those jobs would be in FP&A.
Among all the changes taking place within FP&A today, digital transformation is one of the most significant. Never in the history of business has information been so accessible, so quickly, as it is today.
A core aspect of financial planning & analysis (FP&A) is forecasting and budgeting. To plan effectively and envision the future, businesses must contemplate company-specific, competitive, and macro considerations.