Outsourced FP&A and XP&A for growing UK businesses

Why planning breaks down in most finance teams

The budget takes three months, is out of date before it is approved, and lives in a spreadsheet only one person understands. Forecasts are re-keyed from the ledger by hand. The board pack is assembled at the last minute, and every question from a director triggers another late night of reconciliation.

None of this is a competence problem. It is a capacity and tooling problem. Financial controllers are hired to close the books accurately, and that work alone fills the month. Planning gets squeezed into the gaps, so it stays manual, fragile and backward-looking.

Outsourced FP&A solves this by adding a planning function that already has the models, the process and the tooling, and that plugs into your existing finance team rather than replacing it.

What our FP&A service covers

We scope every engagement around the decisions you need to make, then build the planning layer that supports them. A typical FP&A engagement includes:

• Annual budgeting, with a process that takes weeks rather than months and produces a budget the business recognises as its own
• Rolling forecasts, usually monthly or quarterly, that reforecast the full year from actuals plus drivers rather than from last year plus a percentage
• Driver-based models that connect headcount, pricing, volume, churn and utilisation to revenue, cost and cash, so a change in one assumption flows through everything
• Scenario and sensitivity analysis: what happens to cash if hiring slips a quarter, if a key contract renews at a lower rate, or if the pound moves
• 13-week and 12-month cash flow forecasting, reconciled to the bank and the ledger
• Board and investor reporting, with commentary that explains variance rather than just presenting it
• Budget versus actual reporting with ownership at cost-centre or department level

Everything we build reconciles to your ledger. We work from Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, Dynamics 365 Business Central and most mid-market systems, and we keep the model in a form your team can own.

From FP&A to XP&A: planning across the whole business

Extended planning and analysis, or XP&A, takes the discipline of financial planning and applies it to the plans that drive the financials. The sales pipeline, the hiring plan, the production schedule and the marketing budget are all forecasts. In most businesses they live in separate tools, owned by separate teams, and reconcile to the finance forecast only by accident.

We build connected planning models where the sales plan feeds the revenue forecast, the hiring plan feeds the cost forecast, and the operations plan feeds both. When the head of sales changes a pipeline assumption, finance sees the effect on cash the same day. When finance changes a cost constraint, the operational owners see what it means for their plan.

This is where the finance background matters most. Connected planning only works if someone understands how each operational driver actually lands in the P&L, the balance sheet and the cash flow, and can build that logic rather than just a dashboard on top of it.

How a fractional FP&A engagement works

Most clients start with a four to six week build phase, in which we understand the business, agree the drivers, build the model and produce the first forecast and reporting pack. From there the engagement runs as a retained, fractional service: a fixed number of days a month covering the forecast cycle, the board pack and ad hoc analysis.

You get a named lead who knows your business, access to the models and the data behind them, and a planning calendar that fits your board and lender dates. If you later hire an in-house FP&A manager, we hand over cleanly. The models and documentation are yours.

Why we build the technology as well as the plan

Planning advice without a working model is just advice. Where a spreadsheet is the right tool, we build a disciplined one. Where it is not, we build the data pipeline, the Power BI reporting layer or the planning application that the forecast needs to run reliably every month.

That combination of finance experience and engineering capability means you are not buying a report that someone else then has to implement. The person who designs the forecast logic is the person who builds it, and who is accountable when the numbers are questioned.

What changes when planning works

The budget cycle gets shorter and less painful. The forecast becomes something the leadership team trusts enough to make decisions on. Board meetings spend their time on what to do next rather than on reconciling the pack. Lenders and investors get consistent, well-explained numbers. And the finance team gets its evenings back at month end.

If that is the finance function you want, tell us where you are starting from.