Tag: fpa
All the articles with the tag "fpa".
Continuous close for FP&A
Updated:A three-part series: what a continuous (zero-day) close is and why to aim at one, one FP&A month worked old way and new, and how to build it with mainstream AI tools.
What a continuous close is, and why to aim at zero days
Zero-day close as a direction, what a continuous close actually is, who is talking about it, why the forecast is the point, and why a finance team can now build one: writing the code got cheap, owning it did not.
The use case: a contract signed on the 6th, on the forecast by the 8th
One FP&A month, old way and new: a contract that reaches the forecast in week six or on the morning of the 8th, which numbers can close early, which must wait, and the chain from purchase order to accrual that decides it.
How to build it: small processes, one log, approvals where people already are
The architecture of a continuous close: small processes orchestrated centrally, one append-only log, people at the gates, approvals in Slack or email, and a console that is only a view over the log.
Questions I asked
Questions I kept asking while designing the continuous close, with the answers I settled on: where the forecast lives, the two closes, why actuals load nightly against a monthly budget, exception queues, estimates, idempotency. A page that grows.
Continuous FP&A reporting: the build, control and evidence notes
Companion to the continuous FP&A essay: the nightly load in detail, model-against-code benchmarks, question-box rules, access, failure modes and a go-live gate.
Anaplan Estate: what it finds and how to use it
Updated:A free, open-source review of your Anaplan estate from the metadata exports: 42 defined tests, an action plan of the five most impactful things to do, a change-impact explorer and the evidence behind every finding. A walkthrough on the fictional Caldergate estate, then how to run it on your own models.
Lotus 1-2-3 was finance's first automation. AI is the second.
The spreadsheet moved the ceiling on how much finance work one person could do, and we forgot it was ever automation. AI is moving the ceiling again. Nine things it already does inside finance teams, with pictures, a place to start, and a test for telling a good build from a dangerous one.
12 days to 8 hours: what actually moved the close
I rebuilt a clinical-stage biotech's month-end around Anaplan and scheduled data loads, and the close went from 12 working days to under 8 hours. The list of what moved it is mostly boring. That's the lesson.
Analysis is answering questions, but three-quarters of it is finding things
Variance analysis has four steps. Only one of them is analysis. A look at where an FP&A analyst's time actually goes, and which steps a machine should be doing.
The 4:45-on-a-Friday question
Every finance team knows the out-of-nowhere question that lands at the worst moment. It isn't an interruption. It's a tax. Here's what it actually costs, and why you'll never get headcount to fix it.