FP&A and Executive Performance Reporting

The problem, as our clients describe it

The finance function closes the books on time. The audit is clean. The ERP produces standard reports. What it does not produce is a straight answer to the CEO’s real questions: where margin went last quarter, which customers and products are genuinely profitable, what happens to cash under a downside scenario, why the rolling forecast is always wrong by month three. The CFO can answer what happened. Answering why, or what to do next, means going back to the team and waiting a week.

The symptoms are recognisable. Management reporting arrives late. Variance commentary is thin because no one has time to write it properly. The budget was heroic in September and forgotten by March. The executive pack has 38 tabs and no narrative. The CFO is preparing for the board meeting at eleven o’clock the night before. IT or a local vendor may have built some dashboards, but the dashboards answer questions nobody asked, and the questions that matter are still being run manually in Excel.

What we build

Our work has a thinking layer and a delivery layer. Both matter; one without the other is half an engagement.

The thinking layer is what the CFO pays for. A KPI architecture: the five to fifteen metrics that actually run the business, at each level (board, executive, operational), with locked definitions, ownership, and cadence. A redesigned monthly management reporting pack structured around those KPIs, with a written variance commentary discipline that makes the pack answer the board’s questions rather than presenting numbers at them. A rolling forecast operating model: annual budget cycle, quarterly reforecast rhythm, a rolling thirteen-week cash flow for short-term cash visibility, and a scenario and sensitivity framework, installed under the finance team in a way that makes the discipline permanent rather than consultant-dependent.

The delivery layer is what the CFO sees. A Power BI executive dashboard suite scoped to the mandate, designed from the data up rather than the dashboard down. Source system mapping, data quality gates, refresh cadence, and governance that hold under real operating pressure. The rebuilt monthly pack, owner-readable and board-appropriate. The live rolling forecast workbook, with the automation and the manual-adjustment discipline documented so the finance team sustains it.

Every engagement ends with enablement. The finance team is coached on the new cadence. Handover documentation is produced. A stabilisation period follows delivery, during which we remain available to debug, adjust, and confirm the discipline has taken hold.

Why this is different from a technology implementation

A dashboard project run by a technology vendor answers the question “what dashboards do you want?” The vendor builds to the specification given. The specification reflects what the client thinks to ask for at the moment of scope-setting, which is almost never what the client actually needs six months into operating with the dashboards.

We answer the question the CFO is actually asking, even when it is not the question posed in the meeting. Which three numbers does the CEO ask about every quarter? What is the variance pattern that keeps recurring? What happens to cash if the top customer delays by sixty days? The KPI architecture, the reporting cadence, and the dashboards that come out of our work are built around those questions. The distinction is not aesthetic. It is the difference between a performance system and a reporting system.

Who this is for

CFOs, Finance Directors, and owners of listed corporates, large family groups, and public-sector entities whose finance functions have outgrown their reporting. Clients whose books are fine but whose numbers are not usable. Clients considering a major-firm engagement but reluctant to fund it at that scale. Clients who have tried a technology vendor and found the output thin on finance judgement.

Where the mandate is the dashboard estate itself rather than the FP&A operating model behind it, that is our Enterprise Performance Dashboards offer.

Scope and deliverables

No two engagements carry identical scope. The components below define the perimeter the scoping note draws from; each engagement is assembled from them against the client’s maturity, priorities, and constraints.