Financial Planning & Analysis

This blog was first published in 2019 and updated on July 20, 2022. FP&A software powering your plan to grow Drive smarter, more data-driven business decisions with numbers you can trust. Financial planning and analysis, or FP&A, is one of the most important resources at the disposal of any senior manager. Well-run modern FP&A will give decision makers instant access to an overview of risks and opportunities for the organization, as well as analysis at the most granular level of individual departments. Knowing the actuals and future trends of the organization gives management the closest thing to a crystal ball for guiding their firm. With the rise of advanced analytic techniques and higher demands for data, senior managers and FP&A professionals are feeling the heat to deliver insights that provide useful information – and direct action. Unfortunately, several barriers stand in the way, including:   Knowing the actuals and future trends of the organization gives management the closest thing to a crystal ball for guiding their firm. With the rise of advanced analytic techniques and higher demands for data, senior managers and FP&A professionals are feeling the heat to deliver insights that provide useful information – and direct action. Unfortunately, several barriers stand in the way, including: Manual processes: Spreadsheets have long required people to take data the “final mile,” relying on manual data entry or copy-paste exercises. Unfortunately, people are prone to error. Entering data in the incorrect field or cutting instead of copying data – small mistakes can lead to bad numbers, causing senior managers to make decisions based on bad information. Plus, fixing these errors is costly and time-intensive, taking away from time that could be better spent elsewhere.   Multiple data sources: Too often, data is siloed, spread across multiple departments and multiple software systems. This can make data reconciliation difficult, and with multiple sources, the integrity of the data itself can be called into question: who has the true, final data set?   Data is difficult to visualize and share across departments: Legacy systems make it difficult for finance professionals to share data with stakeholders, and don’t offer solutions to create clear, easy-to-read visualizations.   Rigid or incomplete software: Many FP&A tools currently have a very strict framework that require IT assistance or technical expertise to make changes. And while some modern software might have advanced functionality, it often only covers a small fraction of the needs of finance departments. This can lead to shadow spreadsheet systems, additional software that operates behind the scenes to complete tasks that lie outside of the main “solution’s” capabilities. A lack of consistency: FP&A processes should remain consistent from day to day. This helps to ensure more accurate analysis and forecasting. Furthermore, consistent processes make it easier for people outside the financing department to share data, such as department heads. While FP&A processes are tried and true, many of the constituent parts are trapped in the past. Fortunately, modern FP&A software has taken giant leaps forward to solve these problems. 1 Financial Planning and Analysis: Tools and Use Cases 2 FP&A Tools: Defining Features 3 FP&A Tools: Differentiators 4 FP&A Tools: Use Cases 5 Financial Planning and Analysis Trends 6 The Future of FP&A: What’s Next? 7 Good News: What this Means for Finance Teams Financial Planning and Analysis: Tools and Use Cases Modern financial planning is an art and a science. FP&A professionals gather information, build data models and transform information into clear reports that drive strategy and business decisions. In reality, FP&A teams can find themselves limited by the tools at their disposal. Rigid software, incomplete data and inaccurate reports can slow down the process and impede a company’s growth. It’s frustrating, sure – but more importantly, it keeps finance professionals from doing the analysis that’s necessary to drive organizational change. Excel The go-to tool for finance departments around the world is Microsoft Excel. It makes sense. It’s easy to use and easy to learn. It’s invaluable for analyzing multiple data sets and performing powerful calculations, and it allows for ad hoc analysis without the need for a degree in computer science. Of course, Excel is not without its limitations. Version control can be difficult to manage, particularly with large data sets or numbers that change quickly. And Excel has difficulty with source system integration, process management and clear audit trails. Modern FP&A software solutions aim to tackle a number of these pain points. By offering cloud-based FP&A platforms, the best solutions are able to drastically increase functionality, collaboration and data integrity. A major differentiator? Some softwares try to imitate Excel, while others are built to integrate with it. There is a major difference between integration and imitation. With imitation, you might be working in an Excel-like environment, but it’s not the real thing. At best a light or limited-functionality version of reliable, familiar application, imitation software can be prone to version control, data integrity and a host of other issues associated with a “shadow system” of standalone spreadsheets. If you’re using software that integrates with Excel, however, you know that you’re using something reliable. Rather than attempts at imitation, it’s far better and easier to rely on the power, flexibility and familiarity of Excel to help you transform your financial analysis and planning process into a true powerhouse. FP&A Tools: Defining Features A number of key trends have totally changed the landscape of FP&A. These trends have become so important that they’ve already been adopted by most FP&A tools. At this point, you might call them “table stakes,” since they’re required to “play the game.” House All Your Data in a Centralized Multidimensional Database Data integrity is imperative to trust the data you’re looking at. With centralized and controlled data, you’ll have a single source of truth for the entire organization, and a more efficient, trusted and respected finance team. Using a multidimensional database means you’ll be able to slice and dice your data across by any dimension to get a complete picture of your company performance. Conduct Effective Collaboration and Workflow Automation Collaboration is better when everyone has access to centrally stored and trusted data. Workflow automation allows finance professionals to spend less time collecting or verifying data, and more time doing value-added analysis. And when everything’s complete, you can send reports automatically to different stakeholder groups for analysis and review. Integrate Financial and Non-Financial Data Having access to financial data is key but add in non-financial data, and all of a sudden FP&A professionals can build powerful new models that incorporate more information for better analysis, forecasts and, ultimately, decisions. See how the Cardinals saved entire days worth of time and gained a more proactive, strategic outlook for the office of finance. Manage Governance and Control You need the capability to track every change from every user by way of a reliable audit trail. You also need to be able to revert back to previous versions as necessary. Especially for public companies and those in regulated industries, it’s critical to have visibility into the status of each process, along with access to the most current and accurate data. Strong data governance rules help companies maintain order and organization of their data, ensuring the highest possible level of data integrity. Create Insightful Reports Trusted, reliable data will get you 90% of the way there, but that data needs to be conveyed in an easy-to-understand format. Having a tool that allows you to build insightful, intuitive and beautiful reports for management is key to succeeding in a modern business climate. FP&A Tools: Differentiators While the above are must-haves in order for an FP&A software provider to get their foot in the door, the following features set the best FP&A tools above the rest: Powerful Modeling and Data Discovery A strong FP&A tool will allow you to produce more powerful, useful models. By having access to data that used to be siloed in different departments, FP&A professionals can now find inefficiencies that were previously hidden, helping stakeholders find new methods for strategic growth. Self-Serve Reporting  Modern FP&A tools allow senior managers to have access to data at their fingertips through illustrative, self-serve and powerful dashboards tailored to their individual needs. Data Integration Strong processes set themselves apart by integrating all data, both financial and non-financial, into a single, central repository. Allowing this data to be accessed and analyzed for interpretation in a familiar environment, like Excel, is a best practice that will truly set your organization apart – and it’s a feature that only some FP&A tools provide. Intuitive, True Excel Interface With all the version control, data integration and workflow automation features available, even the most powerful FP&A software is only as valuable as it is adopted – both inside finance and across the organization. Adoption is crucial to FP&A software success, and the fastest way to get there is using Excel as an end-user interface. Excel is already everywhere in business, often imitated but never duplicated by “Excel-like” vendors. Full-featured Excel alone is essential for FP&A software success. See how a familiar Excel interface led to easier and faster user adoption at Partners in Health. FP&A Tools: Use Cases Full-spectrum FP&A tools are like a Swiss Army knife, serving many functions and roles, including: Financial close management: Routine accounting processes – today part of the full spectrum of FP&A – can be automated, removing the need for manual data entry. Not only does this improve the likelihood that everything will balance out at the end of a reporting period; it reduces the time it takes to close the books, giving FP&A professionals more time to generate the stories and recommendations that push their company forward. Budgeting and forecasting: FP&A professionals can work across business lines to create forward-looking data models, allowing stakeholders to make strategic decisions. Integrated planning: Firms are shifting their budgeting processes, enabling them to work in tandem with one another, no longer siloed off on their own. This can include changing from static budgets to rolling forecasting as well. Financial and management reporting: FP&A software can be used to create management reports outlining shifts in business that could occur through a sudden change in demographics. Regulatory reporting: FP&A software should house data – and provide transparent process visibility – for regulatory reporting, and maintain a history of all the reports that have been used in the system. Agile planning: FP&A software and agile planning go hand in hand, helping you plan with agility, plan with confidence and prepare your business for an uncertain future. Learn how iPSL made reporting 66% faster, from 6 weeks to 10 days. Financial Planning and Analysis Trends CFOs want to grow their organization. With the evolution of finance tools, FP&A has become an integral part of that process. These are the key FP&A trends driving that growth. Scenario Planning The next few years are going to test the best CFOs. With the possibilities of stagnant or tightening interest rates and global instability, financial markets are poised for volatility unseen in over a decade. The best way to stay ahead in the face of uncertainty is to prepare through scenario planning. Scenario planning is the process of examining and evaluating possible events that may occur in the future. It involves considering how a number of feasible events may change the value of a business or its cash flow. With flexible models and good scenario planning, FP&A teams can ensure their organizations are able to respond quickly to changing conditions—from the global stage to the local market. Data Available Across the Organization Data moves the world—and in today’s business climate, a company’s success is inextricably tied to data. The integrity of that data is paramount, but it’s no longer good enough just to have quality data. Data must be adopted across the organization—owned by finance in a central, single-source database. This is advantageous for a few key reasons. By maintaining all data in a single repository, it ensures that the entire organization is working with the same numbers – a standardized story about how the company’s doing. Since the data is housed it in a single place, it can be updated in real time, allowing for on-the-fly adjustments and shared reports that update automatically. This trend has become a must-have feature for any firm interested in maintaining a competitive edge. In addition to having a centralized database and version control, an audit trail will help with creating and analyzing reports, saving even more time down the road while ensuring data quality. By consolidating data from across the company, finance can get greater insight into the inner workings of the business, with top-down views of the whole firm that provide visibility into: Which products or services to promote (most profitable) or retire (least profitable) Which features to add/remove/promote on your product roadmap Identifying the next markets/regions for expansion Shifting resources and spend to improve sales and marketing performance Consumerization of B2B Software Let’s face it – a lot of enterprise software isn’t what you’d typically call “user friendly.” At the same time, today’s users have come to expect business software that works intuitively and doesn’t need a user’s manual to operate, like the experience they get with today’s leading mobile apps. And some companies are starting to take notice: a new software sector has emerged recently, called B2BC – or business to business consumer software. B2BC has been driven by the growing acknowledgement that business software should be easy to use, as well as a shift toward mobile platforms. No longer are CFOs or finance professionals tied to bulky desktops; users have come to expect the ability to work remotely with the same level of functionality as if they were sitting at a desk in the office. When it comes to FP&A tools, poor usability will lead to poor user adoption, or the emergence of shadow systems, with users choosing to “export to Excel” for comfort. All of a sudden, data is decentralized once again, with disparate offline files being used across the organization—the exact thing you were hoping to avoid! Advanced Analytics To provide the best experience, modern FP&A software allows finance professionals be able to work ad hoc analysis into their standard models. Modern FP&A software also allows finance teams to: Design reports Explore data Share data Gain new insights Make changes based on data and insights Keep it all in Excel Flexible and Dynamic Planning FP&A is moving away from static budgets and shifting to flexible and dynamic planning. One of the clearest examples of this is the growing adoption of rolling forecasts in place of static, annual budgets. The annual budgeting process, once the gold standard in FP&A, is time- and effort-intensive. And often, by the the time the budget is finalized, the data behind it are already out-of-date and irrelevant. Static budgets are often part of managers’ compensation plans, but this allows them to game the system by setting easily achievable goals and hampering growth. Dynamic, rolling forecasts are constantly analyzed, then reforecasted every period based on actual data from the previous period. As a result, every reforecast is more accurate than the previous one. The ultimate goal of this shift – to a 5-quarter rolling forecast, the most common example – is to replace entirely the painful and time-consuming annual budget process. Companies who have changed their budgeting process to a rolling forecast have seen not only increased forecasting accuracy but higher revenue growth as a result. Read how Meats By Linz saw 3 years’ worth of expected e-commerce growth in just 3 months during COVID-19. To incentivize the shift from a static budget to rolling forecast, many of these companies are also beginning to tie budget managers’ compensation directly to the accuracy of their forecasts. Doing so discourages end-of-year spending sprees, overestimating costs to come in under budget and other ways to game the budgeting process; it’s also shows business managers how their contributions match up directly with the company’s strategic goals. With the right FP&A software, dynamic forecasts can link directly to different departments' software systems and continuously capture data in order to recognize important trends. From here, forward-thinking finance teams can create scenario and “what-if” models to determine the impact of shifting resources and spend allocations, or changing market conditions (such as currency and interest rate movements, new competitive threats or opportunities) on overall business performance. If completed early, dynamic forecasts can prepare organizations for the most volatile economic storms—from a change in interest rates to a major stock market correction. One-Tool Solution There is a strong market and a desire by teams worldwide to help make business processes move better, faster, more efficiently. But most of today’s FP&A tools only cover one of these trends or solve one problem. Rather than picking a tool that handles one aspect of FP&A – or a number of tools to handle multiple functions – it’s almost always better to choose a single, platform solution that covers the full spectrum of FP&A. In addition to budgeting, planning and forecasting, look for a tool that also includes management dashboards and reporting, regulatory reporting, workforce planning and the financial close process. Choose a single tool that encompasses all your needs and helps future-proof your FP&A processes for years to come. Doing so provides benefits such as: Ease of use across your company. One system that houses all your data.  A less intensive learning curve. The Future of FP&A: What’s Next? Automation, artificial intelligence and cloud solutions are key drivers in the future of FP&A. Tools that promote automated processes will continue to allow FP&A teams to spend less time on repetitive, manually-intensive work and more time helping organizations make strategic decisions. The use of machine learning in advanced analytics, while still in its embryonic stages, has exponentially greater potential as the amount of available data grows. This could drastically increase the levels of detail or amount of data used by FP&A teams to produce reports and insights, while keeping calculation times near or faster than current speeds. Machine learning and AI are strong forward-looking tools that will play key roles in FP&A in the future because of their ability to reduce bias, as well as their ability to reduce unknown factors affecting the success of key drivers or points of impact. Voice functionality may also play a role in making day-to-day FP&A operations easier. Imagine asking: ”Hey Alexa, what are our outstanding receivables right now?” or asking a question to a dedicated Slackbot – rather than running an SQL query. Connecting to data is becoming easier, and its integration more seamless. In fact, tools like Boomi, Microsoft Flow, Zapier and more are already making it easier to connect FP&A software with everything from email and Slack to JIRA and Salesforce. Got three minutes? Check out our product demo video and see how Vena can drive faster, smarter, more data-driven strategic decisions. Good News: What this Means for Finance Teams All of this is great news for finance professionals. With more efficient processes, FP&A professionals spend less time developing models, and more time analyzing and interpreting the information at their disposal. The shift to full-spectrum FP&A is creating an elevated, strategy-focused role for everyone in finance, all the way up to the CFO. In-depth management reports on a more frequent basis allow organizations to become more agile and aligned from the bottom up. A holistic plan based on company-wide data allows for greater cooperation between business units and among employees. All of these factors lead to better performance and more successful companies in general—and that’s the true goal of modern FP&A. Are you beyond the 3-minute demo stage? If you’re ready to speak to someone about options for your specific FP&A needs, book a demo today.

The recently released 2020 Vena Industry Benchmark Report has revealed that the majority of today’s finance teams are struggling with disparate data silos. The new report is based on a survey of 350 business leaders, finance executives and operations professionals from a range of industries around the world. It examines how organizations are adapting to today’s ever-changing business conditions, with a specific focus on the people, processes and technologies that enable agile, finance-led business planning. When asked to identify some key data challenges, 57% of survey respondents said “multiple disparate and disconnected data sources.” Additionally, 51% noted that “too much time wrangling data” is a major roadblock as well. This period of unprecedented change has added a new level of urgency for finance teams to effectively derive insights from consolidated data. In order to adjust quickly and help your business plan for the future with confidence, you need easy access to company-wide information for real-time analysis of emerging trends and performance. But if mission-critical data is siloed across multiple source systems, planning with agility is a lot harder to execute. Data silos make it tough to achieve a holistic view of business performance—which is something finance teams need to help key business stakeholders make informed, “big picture” planning decisions as market conditions continue to evolve. Leveraging technology to consolidate data from existing ERP/GL, CRM and HRIS systems into a single source of truth can help finance teams tear down those data silos. Providing real-time access to that data will enable and enhance key forward-looking, finance-led planning processes such as: Scenario modeling and analysis with reliable data on demand. Regular re-forecasting, but without having to consolidate your actuals manually. Updating your business plans on the fly based on the story your data is telling you. (Check out The Ultimate Guide to Financial Planning and Analysis to help you realize your company's full growth potential.) As businesses continue to navigate the increasing unpredictability of today’s business climate, the ability to make quick and informed decisions is critical. And that starts with having the ability to quickly access and analyze the right data from every function of your business. The finance teams that tear down data silos will always be one step ahead. To avoid slowing down your budgeting and forecasting cycle, discover how to integrate your data sources so your finance team can work faster, smarter and more efficiently from a single source of truth. (Check out The Ultimate Guide to Account Reconciliation to help you uphold your company’s financial integrity.) Download Vena’s 2020 Industry Benchmark Report here.

Finance professionals want their BPM solutions to support dashboarding and data visualization for agile, well-informed business planning. According to the 2020 Pulse of Performance Management survey, 51% of finance professionals want their business performance management (BPM) solutions to integrate with Microsoft Power BI. The survey—which is released annually by advisory firm BPM Partners—provides an in-depth analysis of the relevant trends and technologies in the BPM software market. This year’s survey respondents expressed a heightened interest in third-party business intelligence (BI) integrations, identifying Power BI as their preferred solution ahead of all other BI tools on the list. While BPM software helps finance teams consolidate company-wide data for agile business planning processes—like budgeting, forecasting, reporting and month-end close—Power BI allows users to easily visualize key business metrics with beautiful graphs, charts and interactive dashboards. When connected with integrated BPM platforms, Power BI helps finance teams identify business trends, simplify complex data models and dive deeper into the story behind the numbers—all in real time with the most up-to-date data possible.   That level of insight is crucial in today’s ever-changing business environment. If finance leaders can’t clearly visualize how the choices they make today will impact the bottom line tomorrow, they’ll have a harder time empowering key stakeholders with the information they need to make proactive, data-driven business decisions.  A lackluster BI strategy also makes it tough to maintain an integrated approach to business planning, because non-finance stakeholders won’t want to participate if the data they’re working with is difficult to understand. That’s why BPM vendors are investing in data visualization and actively expanding their integration capabilities, especially with Power BI. Vena Solutions, for example, supports a native Power BI Connector so users can easily link Power BI with Vena’s centralized business planning database. Vena is recognized as one of BPM Partners’ Core Vendors for 2020, ranking among the top-five vendors overall this year with a customer satisfaction rating of 4.62 out of five. The integration with Power BI is one of the reasons why flexibility and ease of use are cited as the platform’s primary strengths. When coupled with intuitive BPM platforms, tools like Power BI help finance and operations teams elevate their reporting and analytics processes. When mission-critical data is presented in accessible, easy-to-understand dashboards, stakeholders across the organization can make agile, well-informed business decisions and shape a compelling narrative with their numbers—making it a whole lot easier to plan confidently for today and tomorrow. Learn how Vena combines finance-led business planning with best-in-class business intelligence for confident, data-driven decision making across your entire organization. Check out BPM Partners’ 2020 Pulse of Performance Management webinar on demand here.

When Vena’s Meg Bowie hosted a panel of Vena customers and FP&A veterans, she expected to learn about the evolution of finance and the processes it manages. Instead, what she learned from MasterCorp’s Holly Snyder, Santee Cooper’s Andrea Williams as well as Chrstine Sawyer from the American College of Health Executives went much further, illustrating how injecting FP&A thinking across departments led to transformational changes throughout their organizations.  Join Meg as she hosts an intimate, interactive panel discussion with Holly, Andrea and Christine in their panel discussion, How to Make FP&A Part of Your Company DNA. Visit plantogrow.com for a wealth of on-demand, CPE-accredited videos offered as an educational platform for financial and operations leaders alike.  What Does an FP&A Mindset Mean? As the panel discussion illustrates, FP&A is more than a finance function but a way of thinking. It means finance-led planning that incorporates data from far beyond finance to chart the best future for your organization. It means a way of approaching business-wide planning that includes: Engaging non-finance business unit managers and end users early and often throughout the planning process. Going beyond core financials to analyze cross-departmental data for a holistic picture of where the organization stands today…and how to plan for the best future moving forward. Digging behind summary financials to tell the full story behind your business performance today, and uncovering insights into how to plan for the best possible future. FP&A DNA: Firsthand Accounts Andrea Williams from Santee Cooper shows how putting off the move to modern FP&A solutions can mean costly consequences. How traditional—often unsupported—legacy FP&A software left her finance and executive teams with summary data on the health of the organization—but not how to best move forward, or why to make the decisions they needed to.  “We were using software that had become obsolete and unsupported. So, the longer you run a software that’s unsupported, the greater the risk. For us, it was time to mitigate that risk and make that change.” — Andrea Williams Christina Sawyer from the American College of Healthcare Executives goes a step further. She explains in detail how it’s not only technology that transforms your FP&A, but how you engage and energize your management colleagues in the planning process. It’s guiding principles, such as transparency and providing business partners with self-serve tools, that make for more engaged planning partners and a better planning process as a result.  “It gives us a lot more visibility to what’s going on and when, which I think is phenomenal. Our contributors or end users are very happy with the on-demand nature of getting at the data, where before they had to wait for the monthly financials to be published.” — Chrstina Sawyer MasterCorp’s Holly Snyder explains how, especially as a high-growth company, she put the transparency and tools that Andrea and Christina spoke of into action at MasterCorp. How she adopted a modern, full-spectrum FP&A solution (in this case, Vena) and creative training and implementation methods with results including: Using centralized, pre-populated templates to structure and streamline budgeting and planning processes—with accurate numbers and the audit trails to back them up. Running Finance 101 and Budgeting 101 courses in part to show her non-finance contributors how and why better participation on their part spells better budgets—and better business as a result. Performing a most-mortem after every budget improved the process and identified operational KPIs—e.g. payroll metrics, year-over-year change—at least as instructive about the future of MasterCorp’s business as traditional, core financials. “We are an ever-changing, fast-paced company in growth mode…Vena [has offered us] an efficient way of reporting data, streamlining processes and operating with a lean financial staff—which means a huge savings to our company and the ability to move us to the next step and next direction within finance.” — Holly Snyder In Summary: Why FP&A Means Far More than Finance FP&A is a mindset that extends well beyond finance—ideally across every department involved in your integrated planning efforts, even more so when that process is finance-led. Join Meg and her panel to hear firsthand accounts of the value of using company-wide data to inform your planning decisions, engaging LOB managers early and often throughout the planning process, and providing transparency for everyone from executives to department managers. Watch Meg, Christine, Holly and Andrea’s full panel discussion at plantogrow.com for additional takeaways including: Why to involve non-finance managers, end users and other stakeholders often and early in the planning process, not only for more holistic planning but also so they’re more invested in the success of FP&A in the process. The roles, skills and backgrounds of non-finance contributors to take into account when building new planning processes, selecting new technologies, deploying training and documentation and more. Remembering that planning is an iterative process and the importance of soliciting feedback from everyone involved to improve it with every iteration. Discover through firsthand accounts how injecting an FP&A mindset can lead directly to transformative, positive change for your team and organization as a whole. The value of self-serve reporting in putting insights, reporting, predictive analytics and more in the hands of department managers to drive their own data-driven decisions. Learn how to make FP&A part of your company DNA today at plantogrow.com. Thought Leader Bios Meg Bowie: Manager, Customer Success, Vena Solutions Meg’s software experience spans a decade with roles from support and training to her current role in customer success management. More than most, she understands the importance of teamwork and active listening in managing the best customer success teams as well as delivering the best possible customer experience for her worldwide customers.  Andrea Williams: Financial Analyst, Santee Cooper Over a decade in the power sector, Andrea’s roles included accounts payable, inventory and budgeting. Throughout her experiences implementing new finance systems, she has consistently built strong, transparent relationships with all her end users, guided by a mission of making finance faster and more user-friendly for everyone throughout her organizations. Christine Sawyer: Associate Director,  Finance and Administration, American College of Healthcare Executives Christine has over 25 years of experience in the association field, spanning roles from accounting manager to finance director—and more recently as a business advisor to colleagues outside her organization. She is adept at implementing financial systems, processes and controls to optimize departmental and organizational performance.  Holly Snyder: Director, Financial Planning & Analysis, MasterCorp Holly is a forward-focused finance professional with over 15 years in accounting, budgeting, forecasting, reporting and FP&A. She’s also dealt with multiple country and currency reporting in her global business experiences. Holly is considered a disrupter for consistently applying business analysis and critical-thinking skills to enhance traditional finance processes.

If you’ve been in finance for more than a few years, odds are you’ve heard all about the potential value of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and predictive analytics. You’ve heard that when the conditions are right and the technology is ready, AI promises to uncover hidden insights on your business today and help you plan for a successful tomorrow.  Has that time come for finance to adopt AI and put its theory into practice? According to Vena’s Rishi Grover and published AI author Ramy Nassar—both thought leaders in the space—the answer is an unequivocal yes.  Join Rishi and Ramy as they dive into the topic in the CPE-accredited, on-demand video, Demystifying AI, at PlanToGrow.com, a digital learning platform for business leaders and finance and operations professionals.  As Rishi and Ramy explain, AI and related technologies are ripe for finance adoption for three key reasons: 1. The evolving role of the strategic finance function It’s hard to read a finance or business publication today without finding a reference to the evolving role of the finance function in modern, agile organizations. If you’re reading this, you already know how strategic finance teams aren’t bookkeepers of yesteryear. They lead your company’s strategic planning efforts, plan for virtually any future scenario and tell the story behind your core financial numbers to plan with confidence for today and tomorrow.  2. An explosion in company-wide data for finance to analyze Today’s strategic finance teams are also tasked with analyzing an ever-increasing volume of data. To tell the story behind your numbers and to get a holistic picture of your business, they need to look not just at financials, but at the larger set of non-financial data from virtually every department in your business. And that larger data set—if it’s not already—is quickly becoming too big for humans to analyze on their own.  If anything, this explosion of data is a key reason why AI isn’t just ripe for finance adoption, but essential to uncover hidden insights that no individual or team can find on their own. “AI and machine learning give us the power to uncover signals or patterns buried inside of massive data sets. And we can use those signals to make better, more strategic, more well-timed, forward-looking decisions that are grounded in data insight.” — Ramy Nassar 3. A wealth of readily available tools and resources For evidence of AI and related tools readily available to today’s strategic office of finance, you need look no further than the world’s favorite business software—Excel. In addition to Google, IBM and others, in recent years, Microsoft has made major and growing investments building AI and ML technologies into Excel and into its data visualization companion, Power BI.  Excel Ideas, for example, identifies hidden correlations and anomalies in your data to identify what truly drives growth and other changes in your performance metrics. What’s more, Excel Ideas learns from your feedback to provide increasingly valuable insights every time you use it. “[AI and machine learning] have been around for a very long time. There are lots of companies like Microsoft and others that are creating applications and technologies that are leveraging these underlying models. We don’t need to recreate those.” — Rishi Grover Join Rishi and Ramy to dive deeper into these trends as they unpack best practices to develop a successful AI strategy—from increasing your organization’s curiosity quotient (CQ) to understanding your data strengths and biases. Learn how AI can help maximize business performance and uncover the (often surprising) factors that drive your business the most. And go one step further to make accurate predictions about the future of your market and business performance.  “CQ stands for curiosity quotient…and there’s a group of researchers and there are organizations all over the world starting to look at the impact of CQ on the ability to make better strategic decisions.” — Ramy Nassar  Learn how and why you can make AI work for your finance team today, with key takeaways from Rishi and Ramy including: Diving into the key trends that make AI more valuable to finance today than ever. Knowing the difference between AI and related technologies including ML and deep learning (DL). Understanding how AI can help you distinguish between traditional lagging indicators (FYIs) and data-driven leading indicators (KPIs). Identifying your true business drivers to maximize business performance and other practical AI use cases for the strategic office of finance. Learning about the readily available tools you can use to deploy AI and other emerging technologies today. Discover why the timing is right to adopt AI in your finance department today. Catch Rishi and Ramy’s AI session on demand at PlantoGrow.com. Thought Leader Bios Rishi Grover: Chief Solutions Architect, Vena Solutions Rishi focuses on the continuous innovation of Vena’s product offering, delivery and vision, working closely with clients and fellow industry experts. Starting his financial software career in sales engineering, Rishi has since developed a passion for translating AI and other emerging technologies into customer value.   Ramy Nassar: Digital Expert & AI Author Ramy is an engineer, designer and maker. He leads digital studio 1000 Days Out to help clients, including Apple and Facebook, align emerging technology with their organizational goals and end-user desires. He is a frequent speaker on emerging technologies and the author of the AI Product Design Handbook.

As more companies are exploring the use of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and predictive analytics to transform their business, understanding the strategic impact they have on driving finance-led business planning forward is not only timely, it’s a key differentiator for business leaders today. Vena’s chief solutions architect Rishi Grover and renowned AI expert and author Ramy Nassar are no strangers to how AI is making a huge impact on finance and operations teams. As keynote speakers for Vena Nation, they’ll be demystifying AI for FP&A. We sat down with Rishi ahead of Vena Nation to discover why the timing is now for finance to adopt AI and machine learning (ML), what tools you may already have to do it, how to develop a data-driven AI strategy to successfully plan for today and tomorrow and what else we can expect to learn from their must-see Vena Nation keynote. AI and machine learning have been top-of-mind in finance, technology and business for years. What makes AI more relevant now? RG: A lot of what makes AI relevant and ready for finance today has to do with the evolution of the finance function itself. Now the leaders of integrated planning and the hub of company performance data, finance has found itself managing a LOT more data than ever before— financial and operational, internal and external—now centralized where it used to be disparate or siloed. The vast majority of companies have fully adopted cloud technologies to tap into the horsepower required to analyze that data. And many enterprise software vendors already have machine learning (ML) algorithms embedded into their products so customers can take advantage of them. The volume and diversity of data available to finance combined with the processing power and built-in features of cloud software are precisely what AI and ML need to deliver huge value to the modern finance function. You’ve said AI can help CFOs address strategic planning challenges and make better, more competitive decisions. How so? Can you give us an example? RG: Since strategic planning combines both financial and operational data, ML in particular helps companies dive beneath the surface of their data for better analysis, insights and—more importantly—decision making. ML algorithms can scan through massive data sets to identify granular trends, data anomalies, correlations and other patterns that would take inordinate amounts of human effort to uncover. For example, companies can already gain insight into products that sell better than others in certain geographies, but ML algorithms can reveal that an increase in one product’s sales is a direct result of a previous set of products purchased. You’ve probably already seen this in the “you might be interested in” section of any e-commerce transaction. A classic example of AI is translating images into descriptions for indexing and search purposes. How could this translate into a use case for finance? RG: Here’s a great example. Microsoft recently released a feature that allows users to take pictures of a financial statement or a data table from a PDF file with their phone and to then translate them into an Excel table for analysis. You’ve probably seen similar tech at work with expense reporting apps. What’s the relationship between natural language queries and AI? How does this translate into benefits for the finance function? RG: Natural language querying (NLQ) is an application of AI technologies that allows people to type or verbalize a question the same way they would to another person—in natural language. In finance, a great example is a CFO overwhelmed by analyst questions on an earnings call. Using AI technologies on these calls can provide analysts with suggested charts or graphs that contain answers to their specific questions—or at least a starting point to get to the answer. Technologies like Power BI have embedded this directly into their applications. Whether on an analyst call or FP&A team meeting, the benefit of NLQ is that it can produce tables or charts to answer a data-driven question in a fraction of the time it does normally, in the language that’s natural to ask a colleague, and likely what first comes to mind. Typing a question like, “what product line had the highest sales in Territory B last quarter?” might take minutes or even hours to answer manually. With NLQ and AI, you can get a near-immediate answer in real time. You’ve spoken about Power BI and Excel Ideas as AI tools. What’s the connection? What’s the use case in financial or business planning? RG: Microsoft is investing heavily in making AI an intuitive, built-in functionality of Excel and Power BI. They’re just two, widely adopted examples of intuitive, readily available AI tools for today’s finance teams and perhaps better still, they’re both free. Beyond their analytics and reporting functionality, Power BI and Excel both have built-in features that use underlying ML algorithms to uncover new insights in your data sets that you likely wouldn’t discover on your own. You may have some appreciation for Power BI already, but built-in ML features like decomposition trees and adjusting key influencers make it that much more powerful for predictive analytics and other forward-looking needs. Excel Ideas is a (perhaps underappreciated) feature of the world’s most popular spreadsheet. Ideas scans large sets of data to identify patterns, trends and anomalies in your data, allowing you also to slice and dice your data or to drill down into the cause and effect of each one. Especially for strategic finance teams, Excel Ideas and Power BI allow finance teams to create more meaningful charts, graphs and dashboards, and in turn inform better decision making at the highest levels of their company. 3 Reasons Why the Time is Now for Finance to Adopt AI If you’ve been in finance for more than a few years, odds are you’ve heard all about the potential value of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and predictive analytics. You’ve heard that when the conditions are right and the technology is ready, AI promises to uncover hidden insights on your business today and help you plan for a successful tomorrow. As Rishi and Ramy explain, AI and related technologies are ripe for finance adoption for three key reasons: 1. The evolving role of the strategic finance function It’s hard to read a finance or business publication today without finding a reference to the evolving role of the finance function in modern, agile organizations. If you’re reading this, you already know how strategic finance teams aren’t bookkeepers of yesteryear. They lead your company’s strategic planning efforts, plan for virtually any future scenario and tell the story behind your core financial numbers to plan with confidence for today and tomorrow.  2. An explosion in company-wide data for finance to analyze Today’s strategic finance teams are also tasked with analyzing an ever-increasing volume of data. To tell the story behind your numbers and to get a holistic picture of your business, they need to look not just at financials, but at the larger set of non-financial data from virtually every department in your business. And that larger data set—if it’s not already—is quickly becoming too big for humans to analyze on their own.  If anything, this explosion of data is a key reason why AI isn’t just ripe for finance adoption, but essential to uncover hidden insights that no individual or team can find on their own. “AI and machine learning give us the power to uncover signals or patterns buried inside of massive data sets. And we can use those signals to make better, more strategic, more well-timed, forward-looking decisions that are grounded in data insight.” — Ramy Nassar 3. A wealth of readily available tools and resources For evidence of AI and related tools readily available to today’s strategic office of finance, you need look no further than the world’s favorite business software—Excel. In addition to Google, IBM and others, in recent years, Microsoft has made major and growing investments building AI and ML technologies into Excel and into its data visualization companion, Power BI.  Excel Ideas, for example, identifies hidden correlations and anomalies in your data to identify what truly drives growth and other changes in your performance metrics. What’s more, Excel Ideas learns from your feedback to provide increasingly valuable insights every time you use it. “[AI and machine learning] have been around for a very long time. There are lots of companies like Microsoft and others that are creating applications and technologies that are leveraging these underlying models. We don’t need to recreate those.” — Rishi Grover Join Rishi and Ramy to dive deeper into these trends as they unpack best practices to develop a successful AI strategy—from increasing your organization’s curiosity quotient (CQ) to understanding your data strengths and biases. Learn how AI can help maximize business performance and uncover the (often surprising) factors that drive your business the most. And go one step further to make accurate predictions about the future of your market and business performance.  “CQ stands for curiosity quotient…and there’s a group of researchers and there are organizations all over the world starting to look at the impact of CQ on the ability to make better strategic decisions.” — Ramy Nassar  Learn how and why you can make AI work for your finance team today, with key takeaways from Rishi and Ramy including: Diving into the key trends that make AI more valuable to finance today than ever. Knowing the difference between AI and related technologies including ML and deep learning (DL). Understanding how AI can help you distinguish between traditional lagging indicators (FYIs) and data-driven leading indicators (KPIs). Identifying your true business drivers to maximize business performance and other practical AI use cases for the strategic office of finance. Learning about the readily available tools you can use to deploy AI and other emerging technologies today. Thought Leader Bios Rishi Grover: Chief Solutions Architect, Vena Solutions Rishi focuses on the continuous innovation of Vena’s product offering, delivery and vision, working closely with clients and fellow industry experts. Starting his financial software career in sales engineering, Rishi has since developed a passion for translating AI and other emerging technologies into customer value.   Ramy Nassar: Digital Expert & AI Author Ramy is an engineer, designer and maker. He leads digital studio 1000 Days Out to help clients, including Apple and Facebook, align emerging technology with their organizational goals and end-user desires. He is a frequent speaker on emerging technologies and the author of the AI Product Design Handbook.

Weather forecasts tend to be something people either check incessantly or hardly at all. When people do check, they use the data to inform decisions, like bringing along an umbrella when precipitation is likely, or leave their jacket behind when temperatures are predicted to rise. If you’re not in the habit of checking the weather, on the other hand, you have to deal with whatever happens — as it happens — which sometimes leads to sweltering, getting soaked or worse. Finance departments can’t afford to let organizations ignore the forecasts they produce, because the potential fallout is far greater. When forecasts are valued — not just by the CFO but those across other departments and even the board — they influence everything from go-to-market strategies to cost containment initiatives, resource allocation and more. When they’re not, targets can get missed, much-needed staffing or equipment isn’t in place or customer satisfaction plunges. Unfortunately, unless the quality of forecasts become so poor they are ignored or lead to bad decision-making, FP&A teams might not be quick to reevaluate the way forecasting is done, or make significant moves to improve or optimize them. In some organizations, however, the drive to become more customer-focused, innovative or purpose-driven might help galvanize forecasting processes to be reimagined and taken more seriously. After all, anything that contributes to those kinds of broad-based business objectives will require capital for investment and tie back to revenue and other considerations that a good forecast can help support. While the nature of how this plays out will vary from one company to another, recent research suggests there are a few key areas to bear in mind for FP&A teams that want their forecasts to become not only a measurement tool, but an instrument of value creation: 1. The Best FP&A Forecasts Are Fast In its most recent Planning and Management Accounting Open Standards Benchmarking survey, which includes responses from more than 1,400 business entities, productivity and quality control research organization APQC notes that top-performing firms can prepare their financial forecast in eight days or less. The poorest performers take at least double that, or longer. According to APQC, that matters, because forecasts that are slow to produce may be less relied upon by other parts of the business, compares with those that can keep up with the pace of what’s happening across sales, marketing and other functions. The analysts suggest using “cycle time” in forecasting as a metric to track the performance of a finance department’s contribution to the health and growth of the business. “Chances are, organizations in that bottom quartile have a forecasting process that’s heavily dependent on manual work…in addition to taking a lot more time, this kind of judgmental forecasting tends to be less accurate, because it’s easy for key drivers of performance to get overlooked.” – APQC “Chances are, organizations in that bottom quartile have a forecasting process that’s heavily dependent on manual work,” APQC says. “Time delays are also often the result of a lot of guesswork involved in forecasting, based on subjective input from a lot of different people. In addition to taking a lot more time, this kind of judgmental forecasting tends to be less accurate, because it’s easy for key drivers of performance to get overlooked.” 2. The Best FP&A Forecasts Are Flexible It probably comes as no surprise that forecasting is an area of ongoing study by the experts at Harvard Business School. As a pair of its professors recently explained in an article for the Harvard Business Review, for example, an analysis of forecasting at multiple large, successful companies has shown short-term thinking simply doesn’t work. In fact, the authors suggest forecasts project operating and resource needs over a three-to-five year period, while keeping the nature of the business sector in context, growth rates based on competitive dynamics and input from non-financial teams. These forecasts are appreciated not merely for being accurate — because sometimes, quite frankly, they’re not — but by the extent to which they allow leadership teams to learn. “The forecast is a living instrument and should be periodically updated to reflect any changes in circumstances. Amendments to the forecast are particularly important for firms in evolving business environments or firms that are transforming,” they write. “Such forecasts embody the view that things do not typically go according to plan and there is value in taking a first step, adjusting, and then continuing to head in the most promising directions.” “The forecast is a living instrument and should be periodically updated…things do not typically go according to plan and there is value in taking a first step, adjusting, and then continuing to head in the most promising directions.” – Harvard Business Review 3. The Best FP&A Forecasts Are Forearming None of this is to say that forecasts are just some kind of intellectual exercise, or a way of pointing towards potential opportunities. Great forecasts also warn leaders when they need to make major changes to avoid disaster, particularly as it relates to managing their costs. As the old adage goes, forewarned is forearmed — meaning that a forecast empowers organizations to take the right actions at the right time. This was one of the principle conclusions of a study by research firm Gartner, which showed the various “cost anchors” that weigh down businesses. A staggering 87%, for example, suffered from poor visibility into their costs, which analysts said would be best addressed by a mixture of rolling forecasts, driver-based and zero-based budgeting. “Most companies don’t have a clear mechanism to flag when costs are likely to spiral out of control,” the Gartner report says. “Cost leaders in this area operate from a forecast model that identifies cost headwinds and tailwinds, which can be assessed on a quarterly basis, and considers factors such as foreign exchange rates; selling, general and administrative (SG&A) costs; pricing; volume; and productivity.” Fast, flexible and forearming forecasts may sound like a bit of a mouthful, but it’s what FP&A teams focus on when they want their work to achieve lasting impact. Learn more about the benefits and tangible rewards of rolling forecasts – and 10 tips to make them happen – in the whitepaper, Let’s Get Rolling: 10 Tips for Moving from Static Budgets to Rolling Forecasts.

As more companies are exploring the use of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and predictive analytics to transform their business, understanding the strategic impact they have on driving finance-led business planning forward is not only timely, it’s a key differentiator for business leaders today. Vena’s chief solutions architect Rishi Grover and renowned AI expert and author Ramy Nassar are no strangers to how AI is making a huge impact on finance and operations teams. As keynote speakers for Vena Nation, they’ll be demystifying AI for FP&A. We sat down with Rishi ahead of Vena Nation to discover why the timing is now for finance to adopt AI and machine learning (ML), what tools you may already have to do it, how to develop a data-driven AI strategy to successfully plan for today and tomorrow and what else we can expect to learn from their must-see Vena Nation keynote. AI and machine learning have been top-of-mind in finance, technology and business for years. What makes AI more relevant now? A lot of what makes AI relevant and ready for finance today has to do with the evolution of the finance function itself. Now the leaders of integrated planning and the hub of company performance data, finance has found itself managing a LOT more data than ever before— financial and operational, internal and external—now centralized where it used to be disparate or siloed. The vast majority of companies have fully adopted cloud technologies to tap into the horsepower required to analyze that data. And many enterprise software vendors already have machine learning (ML) algorithms embedded into their products so customers can take advantage of them. The volume and diversity of data available to finance combined with the processing power and built-in features of cloud software are precisely what AI and ML need to deliver huge value to the modern finance function.  You’ve said AI can help CFOs address strategic planning challenges and make better, more competitive decisions. How so? Can you give us an example? Since strategic planning combines both financial and operational data, ML in particular helps companies dive beneath the surface of their data for better analysis, insights and—more importantly—decision making. ML algorithms can scan through massive data sets to identify granular trends, data anomalies, correlations and other patterns that would take inordinate amounts of human effort to uncover.  For example, companies can already gain insight into products that sell better than others in certain geographies, but ML algorithms can reveal that an increase in one product’s sales is a direct result of a previous set of products purchased. You’ve probably already seen this in the “you might be interested in” section of any e-commerce transaction.  A classic example of AI is translating images into descriptions for indexing and search purposes. How could this translate into a use case for finance? Here’s a great example. Microsoft recently released a feature that allows users to take pictures of a financial statement or a data table from a PDF file with their phone and to then translate them into an Excel table for analysis. You’ve probably seen similar tech at work with expense reporting apps.  What’s the relationship between natural language queries and AI? How does this translate into benefits for the finance function? Natural language querying (NLQ) is an application of AI technologies that allows people to type or verbalize a question the same way they would to another person—in natural language. In finance, a great example is a CFO overwhelmed by analyst questions on an earnings call.  Using AI technologies on these calls can provide analysts with suggested charts or graphs that contain answers to their specific questions—or at least a starting point to get to the answer. Technologies like Power BI have embedded this directly into their applications.  Whether on an analyst call or FP&A team meeting, the benefit of NLQ is that it can produce tables or charts to answer a data-driven question in a fraction of the time it does normally, in the language that’s natural to ask a colleague, and likely what first comes to mind. Typing a question like, “what product line had the highest sales in Territory B last quarter?” might take minutes or even hours to answer manually. With NLQ and AI, you can get a near-immediate answer in real time. You’ve spoken about Power BI and Excel Ideas as AI tools. What’s the connection? What’s the use case in financial or business planning? Microsoft is investing heavily in making AI an intuitive, built-in functionality of Excel and Power BI. They’re just two, widely adopted examples of intuitive, readily available AI tools for today’s finance teams and perhaps better still, they’re both free. Beyond their analytics and reporting functionality, Power BI and Excel both have built-in features that use underlying ML algorithms to uncover new insights in your data sets that you likely wouldn’t discover on your own. You may have some appreciation for Power BI already, but built-in ML features like decomposition trees and adjusting key influencers make it that much more powerful for predictive analytics and other forward-looking needs.  Excel Ideas is a (perhaps underappreciated) feature of the world’s most popular spreadsheet. Ideas scans large sets of data to identify patterns, trends and anomalies in your data, allowing you also to slice and dice your data or to drill down into the cause and effect of each one.  Especially for strategic finance teams, Excel Ideas and Power BI allow finance teams to create more meaningful charts, graphs and dashboards, and in turn inform better decision making at the highest levels of their company.  Hear more from Rishi and Ramy in their Vena Nation presentation—Demystifying AI for FP&A—available on demand. If you haven’t already, register now for your free All Access pass to Vena nation today. 

A recent report from consulting firm KPMG reveals that investing in automation tools, improving data accuracy and expanding analytics capabilities are the three most pressing strategic initiatives for finance teams today. But the same report also reveals that most organizations are not tackling these initiatives successfully. The KPMG survey polled 859 finance and operations executives from various companies around the world. When asked to identify their most important priorities, 36% of respondents cited “investing in intelligent automation to improve finance effectiveness.” An additional 34% said that “improving planning and forecasting accuracy” was a top priority, and 36% said “investing in data and analytics to provide enterprise-wide insights.” However, when asked to rank the success rates of the exact same initiatives, only 25% of respondents said they were successfully improving the accuracy of their plans and forecasts. “Investing in data and analytics” was the same, with 25% considering it a successful project. The biggest variance was in the “investing in intelligent automation to improve finance effectiveness” response—where just 22% marked it as a successful initiative for their teams. How to Close the Gap and Achieve Your Strategic Finance Goals While the challenges that finance teams face on this front can’t be ignored, it’s clear that there’s a success gap here, and the importance of closing that gap cannot be overstated. As modern finance leaders embrace their new roles as strategic partners to the business, the need for real-time access to reliable, up-to-date financial data will continue to increase. Finance teams are now being called upon to deliver actionable, company-wide insights that will shape key business decisions and set the stage for long-term growth—which is achievable with the right process automation and planning tools.  But modern tools are only the starting point on the path toward a more agile finance function. Finding true success with these tools also requires a more strategic, collaborative and forward-thinking approach from the teams that use them every day.  Read on to discover three keys to success with process automation and advanced data analytics: 1. Integrate Your Data for Greater Transparency and Collaboration In order for finance teams to achieve a holistic view of their data and identify key business drivers across every function of the business, they need to have a single source of truth for all core finance and operational planning processes. With all the data they need within one system—including sales data from the CRM, transactional data from the ERP and employee data from the HRIS—finance leaders can eliminate data silos, focus on the big picture and give non-finance stakeholders a seat at the table during the strategic planning process. Seamless integrations also help to automate the error-prone process of transferring data manually, allowing leaders to maintain more accurate forecasts and business plans. So, if you’re looking to make the most of your investment in a modern tool, make sure all the data integrations that you need are easily supported. 2. Enable Agile Forecasting Strategic finance leaders are constantly looking ahead and charting the course for their organizations with the most up-to-date data available. Agile forecasting beyond the traditional budgeting process allows finance leaders to model future scenarios, easily analyze variances and better understand how the choices they make today will affect the bottom line tomorrow. Regular reforecasting—especially with forecasts that are generated automatically—also helps finance leaders learn from experience and hone in on the KPIs that are most important to their business. If you’re trying to improve planning and forecasting accuracy with automation and advanced analytics, agile forecasting functionality should be a crucial consideration. 3. Measure the Value of Your Investment Over Time There’s no denying that process automation and advanced analytics projects are significant investments of time, money and people power. That’s why finance teams need to fully understand the value they’re delivering and measure that value as the organization continues to grow. By keeping a firm pulse on the benefits of your automation and data accuracy initiatives—whether it’s efficiency gains, cost savings or an elevated role for non-finance teams—you’ll always feel more confident in your numbers and think more proactively about opportunities for strategic improvement. And if you’re among the finance leaders who consider this a top priority, perhaps you’ll develop some new criteria for what success looks like at your organization as well. Learn how to find success with process automation and advanced data analytics so you can plan confidently for today and tomorrow. Ready to start your own growth journey? Learn how to find success with process automation and advanced data analytics so you can plan confidently for today and tomorrow. Read the full KPMG report here.