Financial planning and analysis teams own the generation and distribution of financial reports at their companies. It’s their job to ensure insights about the company’s financial performance get into the hands of executive leadership and anyone who needs them.
But as demands for agile decision making grow, many companies find that their FP&A teams aren’t able to generate these reports with the speed and accuracy they desire.
In this article, we’ll cover seven essential FP&A reports to include in your reporting processes and why they’re useful, provide templates to help you get started and discuss how you can streamline your FP&A function to make reporting a breeze.
Perhaps the most commonly used FP&A report, profit and loss (P&L) statements give a complete overview of a company’s revenue, expenses, profits and losses during a given time period (typically monthly, quarterly or annually). It’s the baseline report finance teams use to report on their company’s current financial state.
To create a P&L statement, you’ll start with revenue and deduct costs (as seen below) to arrive at net profit or net income—a key profitability indicator. With the help of P&L statements, FP&A teams can see how their revenue translates to net income or how the company incurred a net loss.
Cash flow statements track the incoming and outgoing cash of a business each month and provide a picture of how well-positioned a company is to pay for future expenditures and current debt obligations. They’re connected to P&L statements by net profit or loss, which is the first line item on a cash flow statement and used to calculate operations cash flow.
Cash flow statements have three main components:
Cash flow statements are valuable for a variety of uses including month-end close, financial forecasting and at-a-glance analysis for quick but informed decision making.
Balance sheets provide a snapshot of a company’s total financial position at a given point in time, including their assets, liabilities and equities—and the relationship between them. They’re a key tool for understanding the net worth of an organization as well as its ability to meet its financial obligations.
Balance sheets help FP&A teams budget and plan for the near future and proactively spot and manage potential issues. They’re also a key resource for investors and lenders in deciding whether to invest in your company and evaluating potential returns.
You can find a free balance sheet template for Excel here.
Monthly budget vs. actual reports track budget actuals vs. targets at both the departmental and organizational levels. In other words: They let budget owners know whether they’re over, under or on track with planned spending.
There are a few key reasons why budget vs. actual sits near the top of our list of important FP&A reports. First, a budget vs. actual report keeps your executive and department leaders in the know about where they stand financially. It eliminates budget surprises and increases departments’ accountability for managing their budgets well.
A budget vs. actual report also gives FP&A teams a resource for spotting budget variances and working with the right individuals to gain context and understand why a variance occurred. This fosters collaborative budget management that centers around transparency and open discussion.
When you empower your FP&A team to identify budget variances earlier, they can take proactive steps to fix potential issues and gain a better overall understanding about how the company is spending.
You can find a free budget vs. actual report template for Excel here.
Financial forecasting is one of the most crucial types of FP&A reports for budgeting, future planning and risk analysis.
Financial forecasting reports use a combination of historical and current financial data as well as market trends to make predictions about future performance. Companies make forecasts around every aspect of their financial health—revenue, sales, cash flow, demand, growth rate, costs, market risk and more.
They are ideally driven by AI-powered analytics that mine large sets of data and analyze them intelligently to produce reliable insights.
Given that market unpredictability has become the norm in recent years, FP&A teams are learning the crucial importance of not only optimizing for the current state of the market, but planning for all potential outcomes in the future.
Companies with strong forecasting abilities are better able to understand how certain events will impact their financial stability and react strategically to remain more resilient amid change.
You can find a free rolling forecast template for Excel here.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) make financial goals measurable and provide benchmarks against which finance teams can measure progress. KPI reports are an ongoing resource for identifying where the organization is exceeding financial expectations, lagging behind or needs specific intervention.
They’re also an essential tool for reporting to decision makers about the financial health of the organization, such as:
Important KPIs to consider using in your FP&A reports include:
You can find a free executive dashboard template for Excel here to track all your core KPIs.
FP&A professionals will often find themselves generating reports on the fly to fulfill requests from senior management.
As an FP&A analyst, you may be asked just before a meeting with your CFO to provide an overview of the quarter’s sales by product line, or give a summary of the business’s risks and opportunities.
The data you need in order to provide this level of quick analysis can live in multiple systems and individual reports. That’s why for ad hoc reporting, it’s especially helpful to use FP&A software that can provide one central database from which you can easily spin up reports and distribute them to your team.
To act as the strategic partner your organization needs, your FP&A team should be focused on two things:
1. Continually advancing the maturity of your reporting procedures and capabilities
2. Collaborating effectively with leaders across the organization to ensure they understand the “why” behind the numbers
The reports we covered in this guide are foundational ones—building blocks you can use to establish even more sophisticated financial analysis and performance measurement strategies. Over time, you can add more analytics-driven financial reports to your arsenal, and make use of financial planning software to improve the agility and accuracy of your FP&A reporting.
Did you find this article helpful? If so, you might also enjoy this related content:
Top 3 Dashboards to Improve Financial Reporting
The Ultimate Guide to FP&A
13 Financial Planning Challenges to Overcome in 2023
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Schedule DemoAs Senior Director of Content and Communications, Jonathan Paul leads content strategy and execution at Vena, overseeing the development of owned media and content experiences that help finance professionals fuel business health, as well as their personal and professional growth. When he's not dreaming up new ways to offer audiences value through content creation, Jonathan loves to lose himself in an immersive video game with a solid narrative, lose golf balls pretending to be good at golf and lose time dreaming about time travel.
