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:
Budgeting and Forecasting
Cost Center and Profit Center Planning
Allocation and monitoring of costs by cost center
Analysis of profit centers, projects, or products
Support for top-down and bottom-up planning
Liquidity and Cash Flow Planning
Investment Planning and Project Planning
FP&A has evolved rapidly over recent years. Once a trend, it is now a standard practice in many organizations. Companies increasingly establish specialized FP&A teams to make planning, analysis, and reporting processes more efficient.
New approaches like xP&A expand planning beyond the finance department to the entire organization. Operational data from marketing, sales, and production is integrated into analysis alongside financial data.
Automation using FP&A software and AI is another major trend. Tools like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) help complete planning and business processes that once took hours in just minutes.
RPA plays a growing role in FP&A because many finance processes are repetitive, rules-based, and data-intensive. For example, the Silgan Holdings Austria case study demonstrates how certain processes were reduced from “3 hours to 3 minutes” using RPA with SAP.
FP&A stands for Financial Planning & Analysis and covers planning, forecasting, and analyzing company financials to support informed business decisions.
Controlling focuses on historical data and provides the numbers, while FP&A is future-oriented, creating forecasts, scenarios, and strategic recommendations.
SAP serves as a central data source, while Excel provides flexibility for planning and analysis. Together, they form a proven duo for FP&A processes.
Common areas include budgeting, cost center planning, liquidity and cash flow planning, investment and personnel cost planning, and reporting.
xP&A stands for extended Planning & Analysis and incorporates operational data from areas like sales, marketing, and production alongside financial information.