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The article discusses how the financial planning and analysis (FPA) improves analytics. Important insights are given including the new tools which empowers FP&A to drive better decision-making and the two approaches used by organizations to analytics which include historical and forecast. It adds that FP&A mainly performs historical while marketing and operations disciplines perform the bulk of forecasting analytics.

The article focuses on Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) Chief of Walgreens Boots Alliance, Ash Sharma, who will lead a roundtable discussion at the Association of Finance Professionals (AFP) Leadership Summit to be held on May 19-20, 2015 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Topics covered are the FP&A professionals' leadership qualities of insight, influence and impact on top of accounting, finance and business management skills and the need for the FP&A culture to be pervasive in the company.

The article offers suggestions on how to improve the budget process based on the "AFP Guide: How to Shorten the Budget Cycle" by Nilly Essaides. Topics discussed include the purpose of company budgets, the trend towards continuous budgeting, and shortening the budget cycle time using the top-down approach. Also discussed is resource distribution through rolling forecasts.