From the course: Excel for Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A)

What is financial planning & analysis (FP&A)? - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel for Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A)

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What is financial planning & analysis (FP&A)?

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- [Narrator] FP&A is one of the fastest growing, valuable, yet, underperforming domains in finance. While Excel is the most universally used, loved, and misunderstood finance tools on the planet. The love and frustration of the tool within FP&A makes this training course, "Excel for FP&A," with a core focus on dynamics so important and relevant today. So let's begin by defining what financial planning and analysis, or FP&A is, why it's so important, and how it's notably different from traditional finance and accounting roles. If you were to take the roles and responsibilities of a high functioning chief financial officer, or CFO, and sprinkle them among a team of finance professionals, you would have financial planning and analysis, or FP&A. Now, at a high level, the core purpose of FP&A is to analyze data and offer intelligence into that data so that decision makers can make more effective and more confident decisions. Also, so that these decision makers can grow their awareness, change their assumptions, and reduce the risks of those decisions. This course will help them, and you, get more value from FP&A. So, how does modern FP&A compare to accounting and finance of the past? Well, in the past accounting and finance were focused on historical data and reporting, compliance, controllership, budgeting, forecasting, analysis, managing the systems, transactions and more. You might be thinking, well, isn't that what FP&A's do today? Well, yes it is, but there's more. Because today, FP&A's work both with the overall picture of the company as well as individual functions within it. Verticals, like sales, marketing, human resources, and supply chain now have financial planning and analysis entrenched within them. The business environment has become increasingly more complicated and sophisticated, so the need for speed in decision making has increased dramatically. FP&A is like the financial heartbeat of organizations and business. Information flows to FP&A from other functional groups, while financial intelligence and decision support flows from FP&A to those other functional groups. Being in this unique position, FPA has the responsibility for understanding the financial implications of business operations. FP&A serves as a liaison, and in some ways, sits in a position almost like they're at the top of an air traffic control tower, relating to others across the entire organization in a way most other non-financial functions do not. I'll explain throughout this course how companies can get more value and obviously why it's so important.

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