By Ben Heinl

In the first three articles in this series I have been laying out the Hard Problems of FP&A and the first three have been Integrated Business Planning, What-If Analysis and Scenario Modelling as well as Excel Hell and Power BI Purgatory.

But as maybe a kind of interlude, let’s recognise that if you aren’t thinking about this stuff every day like I am, you may not really understand that there are some Easy Problems of FP&A. You may inadvertently overrate the value or difficulty of something because you see software vendors or analyst firms (g’day Gartner) hyping or making a big deal out of one feature or another – so it is natural to think that those things must be important or hard to solve.

Sometimes it looks like the whole industry loves the Law of Triviality.

For the most part the Easy Problems of FP&A were solved a long time ago and pretty much every reasonable FP&A software out there has a good solution for them.

Here is a non-exhaustive list to start:

Despite how hard every ERP system seems to make it to do good reporting on their own data, there have been good reporting tools that let you deliver PDF or online reports to everyone in your organisation for ages. The biggest issue here is at what price? As in, can you send a report out to everyone in your organisation for one reasonable price or do you have to pay some price for each user that adds up to “too much” when you add it all up?
For the most part, it isn’t clear to me that today’s modern Business Intelligence reporting tools have improved more than incrementally on Crystal Reports from back in the day.

Everyone can do this. For 95% of your visualisations, you really only need column charts, line charts and waterfall charts. Unless you are looking at numbers changing by the second like a speedometer, you don’t need gauges for FP&A. Pie charts tell you barely anything for the amount of space they take up. Almost every new visualisation is a gimmick to sell you something that looks fancy.
(If you click the links, you’ll see I like what Stephen Few has to say on this topic quite a bit)

An extension of visualization is Dashboarding. Dashboards are great for selling software in our industry. You have to have this capability to be relevant. Speaking of law of triviality, for one or two years there you *had* to have a dashboard delivered on an iPad for some reason. But it isn’t hard – at least not anymore. End users can build them and you can get visualisation experts to do them. Sometimes they are valuable. But these days everyone can provide a decent dashboard – except a couple of planning tools that surprisingly are not great at it.

AI is still emerging in our space and the super killer applications of it are not yet fully realised. But whatever those end up being, everyone will have access to it. It is a commodity – in the end everyone will just be wanting to integrate with and use the best AI tools – which half the world seems to be developing. Anyone who forces their customers to use only “their” AI tool will be unnecessarily limiting them.
Side note: beware of software vendors calling random features “AI” in order to tap into the budget that your CEO or CFO or CIO suddenly made available to “not get left behind in the AI revolution.” The hype and hysteria around this is at satanic panic levels; but once it all dies down again there will be some cool features and everyone will be more productive to some degree. It isn’t and won’t be a Hard Problem of FP&A though.

Everyone is in the cloud. Next.

Again, this is not hard. Anyone can make a data entry screen look good. Some appeal to you more than others for whatever reason. Some people loved the old Saabs – some wanted to barf when they looked at them. To-may-to / to-mah-to.
It is a different question however about how much flexibility you have in delivering a planning application – more on this in a future “Hard Problems” article. But don’t be fooled by a simple drag-and-drop designed data entry screen. Look beyond how easy it is to develop and question what else you might want to do with it. It is probably very limited; whatever the salesperson showed you in the demo is probably all it does and not much else. You’ll need more than that.

I think maybe I’ll end the list there for now – you probably get the point. This stuff is not hard – some of it was pretty much never hard, but most of it is now just common in all platforms.

Some of the Hard Problems of FP&A could become easier for more organizations if the industry would come to recognize and standardize on Manny Perez’s invention of the Functional Database (TM1) as the standard database architecture for business modelling underpinning an integrated reporting, planning and analysis. In my imagined utopian future, vendors and consultants could all just compete on who can build the best business solutions rather than our industry constantly having to think and talk about how they are overcoming unnecessary technical limits of their platforms. Manny solved it over 40 years ago.

I’ll get back into the Hard Problems with #5…