Controllers Council recently held a webcast on From Spreadsheets to Modern FP&A: Smarter Job Cost Planning, Forecasting and Reporting, presented by Citrin Cooperman and Prophix.
Following are key takeaways to this discussion. If you are interested in learning more, view the full webcast panel video archive video here.
The Reason You Are Here
In project-driven industries like construction, there’s rising pressure on FP&A to provide real-time insights that guide decisions. Yet construction continues to lag in digital transformation. McKinsey still ranks among the lowest in tech adoption—and over 70% of firms rely on manual, Excel-based budgeting (CFMA, 2023). Disconnected systems, outdated tools, siloed data—these aren’t just inefficiencies. They block insight, agility, and growth. But there’s untapped potential in your data, your people, and your processes.
Factors Impact Construction
In construction and any industry, some factors are out of our control, and others are firmly within it.
At the top: External forces like
- Material costs
- Interest rates
- Policy shifts
- Supply chain delays
At the bottom: Internal factors we can influence:
- Project planning
- Data visibility
- Forecasting tools
- Cross-team coordination
- Agility in our processes
We may not control concrete prices, but we can control how fast we respond, how clearly, we see it coming, and how confidently we act. That’s the power of focusing on what we can control.
FP&A is at the Center of Navigating Change
This venn diagram reflects the real-world pressures facing construction, and where FP&A fits in. FP&A is now the strategic interpreter:
- Translating disruption into impact: Modeling how shocks, from inflation to shortages, affect your margins and timelines.
- Delivering forward insight: Using scenario planning and predictive tools to anticipate what’s next.
- Driving smart, agile decisions: Empowering teams with real-time data to act decisively, before gut instinct leads you astray.
FP&A connects the dots, across chaos, data, and strategy, to guide confident, aligned decision-making.
Current Challenge
With this huge digital evolution we’ve been on for the last decade in the office of CFO, many organizations are just acquiring data sets, ERP, HR systems, CRM systems, project management systems, and at the center of all of this, when they get these applications is where do you put your data when you need to report on it? Where do you put your data when you need to budget? Spreadsheets. And everyone knows the pain that you take in time consuming process that is dealing with spreadsheets, right? They’re error prone, open your organization to security and data breaches. The speed of the space at which businesses evolve and operate nowadays, spreadsheets ultimately just can’t keep up, and this problem only gets worse as organizations continue to grow – both in data as also in human capital and people. This challenge only kind of gets worse over time.
And again, it’s core is this idea of we put our data in the spreadsheets, we do all this work to – try to automate it, but ultimately, it’s static. It can’t help you answer the question, what if this occurs in our business? And not only what if it occurs, what does it do to our balance sheet, our income statement, our cashflow? What is the impact of a 25% tariff on something? You need to be able to answer those questions quickly, but great news, software gets built to solve problems, so it doesn’t have to be this way. The way that Prophix One works is it integrates directly to all these systems and eliminates all that manual download, export, put the data in. And not only does it integrate; it builds the data into what we call data models.
To learn more modern FP&A, along with a Prophix One Product Demo, view the complete webcast here. Or learn how Citrin Cooperman automated budgeting for an A&E firm using Prophix CPM.
ABOUT OUR PRESENTERS:
Citrin Cooperman is one of the nation’s largest professional service firms and the 19th largest CPA accounting firm in the US. It is also ranked the 28th largest technology consulting firm in the US by Accounting Today. Citrin Cooperman digital services include Microsoft, NetSuite, Salesforce, Prophix, Vena, cybersecurity and more.
Prophix is a leading Financial Performance Platform that improves the speed and accuracy of decision-making that allows global finance teams to crush complexity, reduce uncertainty, and illuminate data with access to best-in-class automated insights and planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and consolidation functionalities. Prophix is a private company, backed by Hg Capital, a leading investor in software and services businesses. More than 3,000 active customers across the globe rely on Prophix to achieve organizational success.
