Description

Our finance planning and analysis (FP&A) practice helps growing enterprises align their plans with strategy and operations to maximize results that drive accuracy and accountability.  Our team can help leverage financial analytics and reporting to gain insight and make confident decisions. We support CFO, M&A due diligence,  forecasting, budgeting, and strategic business unit (SBU) initiatives to support the company’s financial condition, P&L analysis and operating performance, with periodic and ad hoc reports in compliance with GAAP and SEC requirement.

Our independent reports and forecasts help inform on the progress and effectiveness of enterprise strategic goals, plans and investments. They also enable management to communicate with external stakeholders. Our FP&A practice enables independent assessment as the “eyes and ears” of the organization as a central liaison between corporate and operations teams. 

Decision support

Our FP&A practice not only reports forecasts and variances but also deploys analytics frameworks and tools to advise management on decisions to improve performance, minimize risk and capture new opportunities internally and in external environments. To this end, our FP&A practice is focused on strategic planning, process improvement, complex accounting (financial, managerial, cost, etc.) and provides periodic “CFO” reports that validate some the following aspects of finance strategy:

• Analysis of historical financials
• Variance Analysis
• Forecast of risks and opportunities to current plan
• Key Performance Indicators
• Key Risk Indicators
• CVP Analysis
• ABC Analysis
• Value Chain Analysis
• Evaluation of Cost Management Systems
• Financial Modeling

We provide SBU heads, controllers, and CFO independent verification and assessment of KPI, and KRI and relevant metrics to answer key questions from external stakeholders and identify various strategies that may be deployed to optimize performance and meet certain goals investor policy goals.

Special projects

The FP&A function is inevitably pulled in to work on special projects. Examples vary from company to company and may include:

• M&A: Identifying potential acquisition targets, Sell and buy-side support, asset valuation integration and divestitures.
• Process Optimization: A perennial problem for large organizations is workflow inefficiency that arises when various technical systems and tools don’t “speak to each other” and are not aligned well. Resolving this often requires time consuming manual intervention. Because FP&A teams find themselves in the middle of these process inefficiencies, they are often the ones tasked with improving them.
• Market research: Determining the size of a given market, market dynamics, leaders, laggards, and potential opportunities in which the organization may have a competitive advantage.
• Capital Planning and Allocation: How much of and on what should the organization’s capital be spent on investments, R&D, etc.
  

Our Key FP&A Practice Purpose

FP&A can directly impact a company’s share price

For public companies, the role of independent FP&A is particularly important because management teams often require independent review and assessment for providing accurate revenue and net income guidance to shareholders based on the budget and forecasts prepared by the team. Getting these forecasts wrong not only prevents management from accurately allocating resources and achieving its strategic plan, but also has a direct and immediate impact on a company’s share price.

In this  CNBC video, you can see how Under Armour shares plunged 23% when the company announced that it did not achieve the prior quarter’s forecast (“guidance”) that it provided to investors.