Christian Wattig

Welcome to FP&A Tuesday!

The newsletter with insights and actionable advice to build your Financial Planning & Analysis skills.

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Here are 3 ideas, 2 quotes, and 1 infographic to get you thinking this week.



3 Ideas From Me

1

To save time with wrangling data, understand these four points:

  1. Where does your data come from?

  2. What's the process to ensure accuracy and timeliness?

  3. Are all metrics based on the same definitions, or is there more than one source of truth?

  4. Which decisions are actually made based on the data?

If you understand that, then you will be able to identify the problems that cause manual work and delays in the analysis process.

2

R&D and software capitalization can get tricky when execs are pushing for doing more of it. They do that to reduce expenses in the current year, when budgets may be tight.

Finance needs to pay attention for two reasons:

  1. You don’t want to risk accidentally breaking the rules and running into audit issues.

  2. Capitalizing costs just to move them into a future period can result in inflated profitability, masking other issues.

3

When preparing for a big presentation, send the key insights upfront via email. Then focus your presentation on the aspects where you want people to discuss and agree on your recommended next step. That's how you can 2x your impact as an FP&A Analyst.

2 insights from others

1

Five levers to improve your cash flow:

#1 Sales:

- Improve payment terms with clients

- Accelerate the lead time to close deals

#2 Procurement:

- Avoid down payments

- Push the payment terms as far as possible



#3 Project:

- Compute cash balance of each project

- Plan your cash in and cash out and monitor it



#4 Collection of overdues:

- Automate the dunning process

- Escalate significant issues to management & key account manager



#5 Inventory:

- Reduce lead time

- Optimise stock buffer

by Nicolas Boucher ( source )

2

Charts are like 𝗷𝗼𝗸𝗲𝘀.

If you must explain them, they are bad!

by Soufyan Hamid ( source )



1 Infographic

"Capitalize or Expense" by Oana Labes ( source )

Until next week,

Christian Wattig



Whenever you're ready to learn more about best practices for creating analysis, forecasts, and presentations that drive the business forward:

 FP&A Bootcamp : Everything I learned from my mentors at P&G, Unilever, and Squarespace while leading FP&A teams for 12+ years.

A course taught live via Zoom full of role plays, case studies, and small group discussions.