Article on the “process” managers use when planning

Jyoti Banerjee, a well respected technology specialist, wrote an interesting piece on the processes that managers use and how they are split between “thinking processes” and “doing processes”. This is very relevant when looking at planning since future forecasting requires more of the thinking piece. You can’t rely on what happened in the past to predict the future…as [...]

Modelling errors and an organisation that is trying to stamp them out

EuSpRIG is the world’s only independent web based source of information describing the current state of the art in Spreadsheet Risk Management.  Their site makes an interesting read, but beware if you are a fainthearted FD!
As well as attempting to describe “best practice” for spreadsheet development they also list the publicly known errors caused through [...]

Not a bad place to start…

Since this site is all about financial planning issues it would a good start to discuss the definition of a financial plan.
Wikipedia gives its own view:
In general usage, a financial plan can be a budget, a plan for spending and saving future income. This plan allocates future income to various types of expenses, such as [...]

Question: Have you been trained to build a financial model?

Forecasts get reviewed by management, boards, investors and potential investors. They drive the decisions that those parties take with regards the future direction of the company. Yet amazingly there is no industry standard for how to produce a cashflow forecast.
I find this quite incredible.
When you buy an Accounting System, the software is designed with rules [...]