Understand the real ‘power of forecasting’

If there’s one thing most CFOs likely learned in 2020, it’s that you can’t plan for everything.

That’s why Christina Spade, the executive vice president and CFO at AMC Networks, keeps things in perspective: “I always like to say, whenever you’re done with the budget, when you put the pencil down, it’s already wrong. Because so much has changed.” The budget instead serves as a “set of guidelines to work with” but isn’t something “you’ll follow like a Bible,” she suggests.

Instead, for CFOs she believes “the power of forecasting really comes in when a collaborative group across the company is able to access how you’re doing real-time against the budget, and then what new measures you’re seeing that you didn’t anticipate in the budget and how to adjust accordingly.”

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