FP&A Should Spend Close on Analysis — Not Spreadsheet Assembly
Every FP&A team knows the pattern. Close begins, actuals start moving, and before anyone can explain what changed in the business, someone has to rebuild the workbook.
That was our reality. Each month, our team spent hours stitching together department-level P&Ls, aligning mappings, refreshing actuals, formatting outputs and chasing one more cut of the same budget vs. actual analysis. In a normal close, that meant three to four hours lost before the real work of analysis began. When a mapping or linking issue surfaced, that could stretch to five or six.
And that is the core problem: FP&A teams are hired to explain performance, pressure-test the plan and help leaders make decisions. But too often, a meaningful share of the job is spent on logistics: pulling actuals from the ERP, aligning charts of accounts, mapping to the budget model, reconciling timing and reclasses, and rebuilding the same workbook every close.
Our previous budget vs. actual process reflected exactly that. During close, Corporate FP&A consolidated department-level P&Ls into a single Excel workbook with variances across every line item. That workbook was distributed to the broader FP&A organization, and each team manually added commentary and formatting for the departments they supported. It worked, but it was fragile, repetitive and slow.
