Underwritten by Jedox

The 2021 Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) xP&A Survey, underwritten by Jedox, finds that financial planning and analysis (FP&A) passed the midway point on its journey to unify and automate business planning and forecasting through extended planning and analysis (xP&A). This data is significant because initial steps are the most challenging, and cumulative experiences quicken the pace of change.

According to the survey, there is also high collaboration between FP&A and business and operations teams when forecasting and planning. This encouraging finding indicates that FP&A is actively and effectively collaborating with business and operations counterparts, which is important because higher collaboration scores correlated to higher overall xP&A scores in the survey.

The survey generated 300 responses from corporate finance practitioners.

More highlights include:

• Multinational companies (MNCs) and those with annual revenue more than $1 billion have higher xP&A scores. Specifically, MNCs have higher scores than the two regions in the survey, Asia Pacific and North America (U.S. and Canada). MNCs are powered by collaboration, results tracking, producing out-of-cycle forecasting and use of leading-edge data tools.
• Process alignment leads process automation, as 76% of finance and business and operations teams are fully or partially aligned on their process from end to end; 40% have automated this flow.
• While 90% of companies can reforecast, only 8% of FP&A can do so easily, indicating room for improvement. Agility in finance demands that financial professionals react quickly to changing circumstances and contribute to planning at the highest levels. 

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Press Inquiries

Press release - Survey: FP&A and Business and Operations Teams in APAC Have High Collaboration in Forecasting and Planning

Contact [email protected] or call 301.907.2862 for more in-depth information, to read the full report or to arrange an interview with the AFP Research team.

Questions about this subject?
Contact Bryan Lapidus, Director of FP&A Practice at AFP.