The New Mandate for FP&A: Predict, Enable, Accelerate

🕐 Reading Time: 7 min

Summary

In this edition, we’ll learn about the following:

1. Why today’s FP&A teams are facing conflicting mandates—and why that’s a problem

2. What the new FP&A mandate looks like: Plan, Enable, Accelerate

3. How modern finance leaders are building agile, connected planning models

4. Why XP&A is essential for shifting from static to continuous planning

5. How technologies like Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, and Acterys make this transformation real

Today’s FP&A leaders face a growing tension.

On one hand, they’re expected to deliver accurate reports, maintain financial controls, and meet the daily operational demands of the business. On the other, they're being asked to step into a more strategic role—one that involves enabling faster decisions, modeling the future, and guiding capital allocation in real time.

The problem is: most FP&A teams are still equipped—and organized—for the first mandate, while being increasingly accountable for the second.

Meeting daily operational needs is a full-time job. Yet finance leaders are increasingly expected to be architects of the future—driving strategy while continuing to focus on today’s execution.

This is why a new FP&A mandate is emerging. One that’s not just about doing more—but about operating differently.

The New FP&A Mandate: Plan. Enable. Accelerate.

This mandate reflects what high-performing organizations increasingly expect from finance:

• Plan what’s likely to happen so leaders can make decisions with foresight

• Enable better trade-offs by aligning capital to strategy—not just budget

• Accelerate execution by making planning faster, more adaptive, and more integrated

It’s a shift from a reactive, cyclical function to a proactive, embedded one.

And it’s not optional.

Let’s break down what it looks like in practice.

1. Plan: Build Forward-Looking Visibility

Reporting on the past isn’t enough. Business leaders want to know what’s coming—and what they can do about it.

Modern FP&A teams are building driver-based models that link operational inputs (like sales forecasts and headcount planning) directly to financial outcomes. They’re no longer forecasting in silos or locking themselves into annual assumptions.

Instead, they’re enabling real-time insight through:

• Scenario planning that reflects operational realities

• Rolling forecasts that adapt to new information

• Early warning indicators tied to real business drivers

This kind of prediction doesn’t mean precision—it means providing the best available lens into what’s likely, with enough agility to respond.

2. Enable: Align Resources with Strategic Goals

Finance’s job isn’t to say “no.” It’s to help the business invest wisely. That means moving from a gatekeeper role to a true partner in trade-offs—guiding where and how to deploy capital based on ROI, risk, and long-term impact.

This requires:

• Being embedded in strategic conversations, not just budget reviews

• Translating financial implications into clear business terms

• Helping teams understand the cost and impact of their decisions—not just their variance

The most effective FP&A leaders act like internal consultants—helping business units prioritize and resource the initiatives that matter most.

3. Accelerate: Support Agility Without Losing Control

Static annual plans don’t hold up in a world where strategies evolve quarterly and execution shifts weekly.

But agility without structure leads to chaos. That’s why modern FP&A teams are redesigning their planning operating model—not just their timelines.

They’re:

• Automating planning cycles to reduce friction and lag

• Enabling distributed inputs while maintaining governance

• Creating frameworks for continuous reforecasting that supports execution, not just finance

The goal isn’t to move fast and break things—it’s to move faster with clarity. To shift planning from a constraint to a capability.

What This Means for Finance Leaders

For CFOs and FP&A leaders, this mandate is more than a shift in workflow—it’s an expansion of influence.

The opportunity is to lead from the center: to connect strategy, resource allocation, and performance in a way no other function can.

But doing so requires stepping beyond the bounds of traditional FP&A. It means:

• Orienting teams around decision enablement, not just reporting

• Modeling operational drivers, not just line items in a model

• Designing collaborative, always-on planning processes

• Bringing commercial, operational, and analytical thinking to every table

This is the promise—and the challenge—of XP&A (Extended Planning & Analysis).

XP&A: Powering the New Mandate

XP&A isn’t a toolset. It’s a mindset. It reflects the reality that planning is no longer just a finance activity—and that decisions can’t wait for quarterly updates.

To deliver on the new FP&A mandate, finance must embrace a model where planning is:

• Connected across functions

• Continuous, not calendar-bound

• Driver-based, not static

• Collaborative, with finance as an enabler—not the bottleneck

This shift doesn’t diminish finance’s core responsibilities. It elevates them. It expands FP&A’s role from reporting on strategy to operationalizing it.

XP&A is the infrastructure for that expansion.

How The Right Technology Can Help

Transformation begins with mindset—but it’s enabled by systems. Most FP&A teams are held back by legacy tools that create silos, rely on manual work, and delay insight. To operate with speed and foresight, finance needs the right infrastructure.

There’s no shortage of tools promising better planning, reporting, and analytics. But piecing together disconnected point solutions often creates more complexity than clarity. What today’s finance teams need isn’t just another tool—it’s an extensible ecosystem: a unified, adaptable foundation that connects data, models, and decision workflows across the business.

That’s why we focus on a tightly integrated toolkit built on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, and Acterys—designed to scale with your needs, not constrain them.

1. Unified Data with Microsoft Fabric

Fabric provides a connected foundation for data across functions and tools—eliminating reconciliation work and giving finance real-time access to the numbers that matter. It enables:

• A single source of truth across departments

• Rapid ingestion of operational and financial data

• Scalable architecture to support growth and complexity

2. Decision-Ready Insight with Power BI

Power BI is more than visualization. It’s how finance turns complexity into clarity. It helps FP&A teams:

• Build dashboards that surface actionable trends

• Link performance to drivers through interactive models

• Enable self-serve access for stakeholders across the business

3. Connected Planning with Acterys XP&A

Acterys enables finance teams to shift from Excel-based workflows to a structured XP&A environment that:

• Supports continuous forecasting and scenario modeling

• Integrates tightly with the Microsoft stack (including Excel, D365, Azure, and Power BI)

• Embeds workflows and governance into collaborative planning

Together, these technologies do more than streamline reporting and reduce manual effort—they enable a connected planning ecosystem where finance, operations, and business leaders can work from the same data, align on the same drivers, and make faster, better decisions with confidence.

What Success Looks Like

When finance embraces this new mandate—and builds the systems to support it—the impact is visible across the business.

Instead of chasing reports or stitching together siloed data, your FP&A team becomes a true enabler of speed, clarity, and strategic execution.

• Business leaders engage with finance early, not just after the fact—because they see finance as a partner in decision-making.

• Planning becomes a continuous conversation, not a once-a-year bottleneck.

• Models are built around real drivers, not just financial line items—giving the business foresight, not just hindsight.

• Teams across departments work from the same data foundation, using shared assumptions and aligned goals.

• Finance spends less time managing spreadsheets—and more time guiding where the business should go next.

This is what transformation looks like in practice: a finance function that’s connected, confident, and core to how the business moves forward.

Final Thought

The most effective FP&A teams don’t just explain performance. They shape it.

By embracing a mandate to predict, enable, and accelerate, finance leaders can extend their influence, enhance their impact, and drive strategic execution across the business.

This is the future of finance—and it’s already here.

P.S. If This Was Useful, Let’s Talk.

If your FP&A team is being asked to predict, enable, and accelerate—but you're still working with fragmented tools and static models—we can help.
We specialize in transforming Power BI into a connected, driver-based planning ecosystem, built on Microsoft Fabric and Acterys.
Let’s explore how to bring continuous, collaborative planning to life in your organization.