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FP&A consulting for a budget that disagrees with the actuals.

We put the budget, the forecast and the actuals on the same entities and accounts, and give each driver an owner outside finance. The price is fixed after we read the planning model.

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FP&A consulting designs and builds the planning model, the driver tree and the forecast cycle for a finance team whose budget has outgrown the workbook. Constancia, an EPM consultancy, does that work for multi-entity groups with a budget round or a funding round in the diary.

Reads
The budget workbook as it is run, the actuals it is compared with and every mapping between the 2.
Produces
1 planning model on the structure the actuals use, with a named owner for each driver in it.
Then
The build at a fixed price, and the first forecast on the model runs beside the old workbook.

FP&A consulting from Constancia builds 6 things into 1 planning model, and the driver tree comes first.

  1. 01

    The driver tree

    Headcount, pipeline, volume and price drive the plan, and each driver has an owner outside finance who supplies the number.

  2. 02

    The structure

    The plan sits on the entities, accounts and cost centres the ledgers post to, and the mapping table disappears.

  3. 03

    The budget round

    Budget holders enter their numbers in the model against their own cost centres, and finance stops merging 40 workbooks.

  4. 04

    The rolling forecast

    Each month the forecast rolls forward 1 period from the drivers and last month's actuals, with no rebuild.

  5. 05

    The variance analysis

    Actuals against plan by entity and line, with the driver that moved shown beside the line it moved.

  6. 06

    The reporting off the model

    The board's planning views, the divisional packs and the cash forecast all read the same model on the same calendar.

The budget workbook and the ledger disagree because each holds the numbers on its own structure.

Where your group budgets in 40 divisional workbooks and reports actuals from 3 ledgers, a mapping table joins the 2 structures every month. That table sits in 1 analyst's workbook, and the analyst adds a row each time a cost centre is created.

A variance on distribution cost takes a day to explain, because the plan holds it in 1 line and the ledger in 6. Constancia has completed 58 implementations over 35 years, and an FP&A survey with us begins with that mapping table.

We rebuild the plan on the ledger's structure, hand each driver to a named owner and run the first forecast beside the old workbook.

FP&A consulting from us fits 4 kinds of finance team.

  1. 01

    A plan on a different structure from the actuals

    The budget is held by product line and the ledger by cost centre, and a mapping table joins them.

  2. 02

    A budget round that takes a quarter

    Finance collects workbooks from 40 budget holders, merges them by hand and reopens the merge 3 times.

  3. 03

    A funding round or a budget date

    Investors or the board expect a 3 year plan by a date, and the forecast behind it has to reconcile to actuals.

  4. 04

    Drivers with no owner

    Headcount, pipeline and volume are typed into the plan by finance, and nobody outside finance has agreed them.

Abacum (FP&A software) suits a finance team that plans in weeks and consolidates elsewhere. OneStream (EPM software) suits a group that wants its close and its plan on the same model.

The forecast cycle takes a different number of days in a workbook, on an unowned platform and on an owned one.

The owner in the third column is a named person outside finance, and the platform holds their name against the driver.

How the FP&A cycle behaves in a spreadsheet, on a platform nobody owns and on a platform with named owners.
A spreadsheetA platform nobody ownsA platform with named owners
The budget collection40 workbooks arrive by email over 3 weeks, and finance merges them by hand.Budget holders enter numbers on the platform, and finance corrects them in a workbook afterwards.Budget holders enter numbers against their own cost centres, and the model rejects a line with no owner.
The forecast rollAn analyst copies last month's file, repoints 200 formulas and rebuilds the links to actuals.The forecast rolls, and nobody can say which drivers moved it.The forecast rolls from the drivers, and each driver's owner sees their number change.
The plan to actuals joinA mapping table in 1 workbook, extended by hand each time a cost centre appears.A mapping built at go-live, unchanged since, with 30 unmapped cost centres in a suspense line.1 structure for plan and actuals, so no mapping exists to maintain.
The driver assumptionsA number keyed by finance in week 4, with no record of where it came from.A driver loaded from a source nobody in finance can name.A driver supplied by its owner in HR, sales or operations, with the date it was agreed.
The 3 year planA separate workbook that shares no cells with the budget.A long range model on the platform, built by a contractor who has left.The same model extended 36 periods, on the same drivers and the same owners.

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