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Corporate budgeting in Excel - how we do it at F1F9

Corporate budgeting: understanding the complexities

The budgeting process is often criticised for being time-consuming, adding far too little value and being out of date before the printer ink is dry. Arguments are also made against forecasting: either the outturn result is known (in which case why bother forecasting in the first place?) or the...
Financial model maintenance

Five reasons to outsource financial model maintenance

We work with plenty of clients on building data-heavy enterprise models to meet their needs. The models include functionality to accommodate actual financial figures, budgets and forecasts. A recent example is a large business model with five subsidiaries. It has the ability to store budget copies...
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Using F11 quick charts

Most financial modellers create graphs to visualise data or to check trends. While building finance models, a good modeller will keep asking themselves whether their results are looking sensible. A good financial modeller will regularly chart line items and analyse the resulting trends - even while...
Support with building financial models

Time to call in the financial modelling experts?

Why take a driving test if you have no intention of ever driving a car? Answer: you wanted to acquire the knowledge, skills and experience to confirm that this activity wasn’t for you. The more informed you are, the more likely you are to make sensible decisions. At F1F9 , we have been...
How to use flags in financial models

Put out more flags

Every forecast model we build in F1F9 has a Time sheet: a worksheet dedicated to important dates e.g. when the model starts, when the model ends, when the project starts, when the project ends, when the project moves from one phase to another. The Time sheet is a foundation sheet: bringing together...
Incorporating actuals in a financial model

Adding actuals to a financial model

We had a great question from one of our financial modelling online course subscribers are asking about the design of financial models with historical data at their heart, a.k.a. "actuals".   “This is the bit I find daunting: when you start an assignment, you don’t always have a set of...
Best practice financial modelling

Modelling best practice – actions speak louder than words

There’s no shortage of blogs, articles and opinion pieces on how we should go about building a financial model, but they only really scratch the surface and need some imagination to go from principles to practicality. That’s why we’ve put together an example model to share with anyone who’s interested in taking a look.
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Deliverable Management Information Systems

Why did substantive changes to the MS Excel spreadsheet end 20 years ago? Not even a simple tweak to the LOOKUP function to allow exact-match with a FALSE argument? That on its own would unify a batch of sub-optimal approaches available through all the alternatives, with INDEX/MATCH combinations...
Data Visualisation | F1F9

Charting new territories with FAST

In my experience making a good model requires you to spend time not modelling, but talking about it instead. With my immediate team, I can talk in front of the monitor with the model on it. But other project members do not talk in columns and rows; they prefer to talk with pictures. Pictures mean...