Blog · Industry
Actual against budget against forecast, by cost centre, account and project. What is driving the increase: headcount, rates, volume, timing or a one-off. Which workstream on a large programme is burning contingency. From the ledger, budget, headcount and purchase order files you already hold, reconciled to the trial balance.
A practical path for a sales operations or finance team that assembles the monthly sales report by hand: what to automate first, the definitions that have to be written down before anything can be computed, the four exports the whole pack comes from, the identity checks that replace the reconciliation week, what stays manual, and the order in which the pack's sections move from spreadsheet to computed table.
16 Sept 20263 min readWhy sales, finance and the board each quote a different figure for the same quarter, the three definitions behind them, the bridge from bookings to billings to recognised revenue with the timing and the adjustments that separate them, the identity that ties the three together, and the governance rule that every report names which of the three it is showing.
16 Sept 20262 min readThe five checks a commercial analyst runs on a workbook before its totals go into a deck: the SUM range covers every row, hidden and filtered rows are counted or excluded on purpose, no number is typed over a formula, the pivot matches the sheet, and the total matches the source system. Each with the symptom it catches and the one-minute test.
16 Sept 20263 min readA reading guide for a forecast bridge from last period's number to this one: the check that the lines sum before anything is read, the order to read them in, closed, slipped, lost, new, resized, the deal list behind each line as the thing to open, the line with no deals behind it as the one to distrust, the repeat slippers across bridges, and the two lines that set next period's calibration.
16 Sept 20263 min readWhat a monthly commercial pack for a CEO or board should contain when every number has to be defensible: seven tables, the identity that ties each to the next, the one page of movements that replaces the narrative, and why a pack built this way takes an hour to produce on the first working day instead of a week.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow finance teams should choose analytics software: start from the questions, check the data you hold, ask vendors ten questions, avoid the traps.
24 Sept 20263 min readMeasure, metric and KPI are used as synonyms and are three levels of the same thing. A measure is a number computed from data, such as revenue or a count of accounts. A metric is a measure given a definition and a context, such as revenue per active account over a trailing twelve months. A KPI is a metric that someone owns, that has a target, and that a decision depends on. This page sets out the three, gives the test that separates a KPI from a metric, and shows how to cut a forty-tile dashboard to the five that matter.
17 Sept 20264 min readCost and variance analytics for finance teams. What moved, why, and whether it adds up.
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