What is FP&A?
Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) is a key tool in modern corporate management. It encompasses the planning, forecasting, and analysis of company financials, providing management with reliable data to support informed business decisions.
For controllers, finance teams, and CFOs, FP&A is crucial for strategically managing company figures, developing scenarios, and making well-informed decisions. A structured FP&A process allows businesses to monitor financial performance, plan proactively, and respond flexibly to changes.
The goal of FP&A is not only to capture a company’s financial situation but to actively guide it. Speed, agility, and forward-looking planning are key.
Core responsibilities include:
Large organizations often have both FP&A analysts and financial controllers. While the roles are closely related, they have different focuses. Simply put, controlling looks at the past, while FP&A focuses on the future.
Controllers analyze historical data, monitor annual and quarterly reports, and work closely with accounting to ensure accurate reporting. FP&A analysts, on the other hand, create forecasts, scenario analyses, and strategic plans to provide management with actionable insights. They typically develop best-case, realistic-case, and worst-case scenarios.
👉 In short, controlling delivers past data, while FP&A translates it into recommendations for the future.
Many companies rely on SAP as a central ERP system and Excel as a flexible analysis tool for planning and forecasting. The challenge is using SAP data efficiently without getting lost in Excel spreadsheets or losing version control.
Integrated solutions like Allevo Junan, which work directly in SAP while using the familiar Excel interface, provide significant advantages for FP&A: