When it comes to improving your business’ financial planning and analysis practices, it can help to get an external view. Outsourced FP&A strategy consulting services ensure your business can access the objectivity and expertise it needs and deliver better insight and decision making.
An outsourced FP&A consulting team’s main goal is to integrate with your financial teams. They work with your business to trim the fat, boost productivity, and help you make more informed decisions. By engaging the services of a dedicated FP&A consulting company, your business will be able to take advantage of clear benefits, such as:
Essentially, they help you access smarter analytics, for better business.
Here’s a high-level view of how they do it.
One key role of your outsourced FP&A consulting team is to ensure your business is in good financial health—and that it remains that way. Experts in financial evaluation, they perform an in-depth review of your business’ key metrics. This can include debt to equity, working capital, and interest coverage ratios. They then use this to report on your business’ financial health position, and deliver proposals on where and how it can improve.
Outsourced FP&A consulting specialists come into your organisation with fresh eyes. As such, a FP&A consultant may be able to see things your current finance team doesn't.
As they’re not as immersed in your business’ financial health as your internal teams, they can ask the pointed questions. Is your business using its working capital as effectively as it could be? Are there other ways of utilising cash flow to deliver better outcomes?
External FP&A consulting team is able to see the bigger picture. They can evaluate your existing investments, and where your business may be able to better utilize its spending to see better returns.
Your FP&A consulting team can analyse your business data and determine which products or services are the most effective money-makers. Which generate the most profit, and have the highest profit margins? They can then use their analysis to provide advice on where and how to boost profits from other products or services. Or, where to reign in spend on underperforming areas.
Outsourced FP&A strategy consulting specialists ensure your business’s departments, functions, units, and teams are all working as efficiently as possible. They identify the percentage of resources allocated to each area, and which section consumes the most resources. They can then advise where resources could be better allocated for more effective financial outcomes.
One key function of FP&A consulting services is to help your business with its budgeting. This can occur at all levels of the business. It can be as granular as working with individual units and departments to plan annual budgets. Or as high level as consolidating individual team budgets into a larger organizational budget.
Their role is to help your business identify where it can optimize its spending, and deliver a plan to achieve this. And if you’re one of the 58% of mid-to-large-sized organizations still using Excel spreadsheets for budgeting, this is a game-changer in terms of data volume, accuracy, and efficiency.
Gathering the right data is important. But being able to accurately translate that data into useful and actionable business insight is far more valuable. External FP&A consulting teams will help your business to gather, collate, and translate your internal financial data into more accurate reports. Reports that are able to be understood at all levels of the business.
This can take the form of creating corporate financial reports for the Executive team, to enable better business planning. It can be drafting departmental reports to identify where resources are allocated, and where they can reign in costs. Or it can be as straightforward as creating sales reports to identify the best-selling products or services, and which deliver the best ROI.
It’s all about using their expertise to leverage more concise data and facilitate better decision-making.
Interpreting your business data into accurate and insightful forecasts is also a critical role of FP&A strategy consulting teams. Engaging an external team to deliver this service adds objectivity to your forecasts.
Rather than getting bogged down in how things are always done, an external FP&A consultant can use an unbiased view to help your business plan operations more effectively. They can use historical data to compare against forecasts and budgets. They help you track performance variance, and identify areas for business improvement going forward. And they do all this with a fresh and impartial viewpoint.
Financial regulators are putting increasing pressure on businesses to meet stricter, more granular requirements. This requires them to have more precise reporting frameworks in place that meet financial requirements, both now and in the future.
Your FP&A consulting team can work with you to review your current reporting and data gathering practices, and identify areas where you may need to improve. They’ll provide you with a clear path forward. One that ensures your data gathering and reporting mechanisms are in line with ever evolving compliance requirements.
Manual financial processes can work to stifle business growth. A specialist FP&A consulting team can help you avoid this by advising and deploying the best methodology to streamline your business’ digital transformation.
They can optimise your processes to empower automated data gathering and delivery services, and improve your workflows for making business decisions. They can help you to identify and deploy the right FP&A platform for your business’ needs, which will improve your data architecture and enable automation of your manual tasks.
You’ll be able to accelerate routine finance processes, forecast more frequently, and drive strategic improvements for business resilience.
By engaging the services of an outsourced FP&A consulting team, you’re able to leverage specialist financial planning, modelling, and advice. Their aim is to help you identify and act on opportunities for business growth. It’s all about optimising how your business’ financial processes operate, and delivering long-term improvements.
At the end of the day, outsourced FP&A services empower your business to access smarter analytics. They enable better decision-making, improve financial control, and ultimately deliver a better business. Get in touch with us today to discuss how outsourced FP&A consulting services can help your business thrive.
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