An xP&A practice built around driver-based planning, rolling forecasts, and a close that doesn't take all month — wired into Power BI and Microsoft Fabric so every plan, actual, and forecast lives in one model.
Most planning lives in spreadsheets. Most reporting lives in Power BI. Most close lives in the GL. Each cycle, finance reconciles the three by hand — and the explanation usually doesn't make it onto the next page.
The annual plan lives in Excel. Actuals live in Power BI. Forecasts live in someone's email. Reconciling them is a job in itself.
Plans built bottom-up by line item — so when a number moves, no one can say which lever changed. Scenario planning becomes guesswork.
By the time the close is signed, the variance commentary lands a week later. Decisions are already being made on stale numbers.
Eight focused capabilities across the planning, forecasting, and close cycle. We sequence them — start with the one that hurts most.
Top-down driver trees that link revenue, cost, and headcount to the operational levers behind them — built in Acterys with write-back to your governed model.
Bottom-up submission templates, top-down allocation, version control, and a workflow that finance teams actually want to use.
13-week cash, monthly or quarterly P&L, with predictive models on top — so the forecast updates as actuals land instead of every quarter.
Base / upside / downside / stress as first-class objects — each one a real version of the model, not a copy of a copy of a tab.
Reconciliation automation, journal review workflow, and a daily close monitor that surfaces blockers before they become Friday-night problems.
Plan-vs-actual reporting with auto-generated variance bridges and structured commentary capture — so the "why" travels with the number.
Position-level planning with comp bands, ramp curves, and approval workflow integrated to your HRIS — not a separate Excel file.
One source for the management deck, board pack, and investor update — built on the same model as the operating dashboards.
Plan, forecast, close, and report should be four views of the same model — not four pipelines stitched together. Here's how we wire it.
driver-based
rolling
accelerated
plan vs actual
Driver-based budget with operational levers, version-controlled, with bottom-up submission and top-down allocation in the same model.
Rolling forecast that updates monthly. Predictive baseline + finance overrides. Scenario versions sit beside the base, not on top.
Reconciliation automation, journal workflow, and a close-day monitor. Variance bridges generated as soon as actuals post.
Plan-vs-actual dashboards with structured commentary. The "why" travels with the number — into the board pack, automatically.
Five phases. One sign-off each. A working planning model in production by the end of week eight.
Calendar audit, current spreadsheets, GL chart, source-of-truth map.
Driver tree co-designed with FP&A. The model your CFO would whiteboard.
Acterys models, Power BI reports, write-back wired to the governed lakehouse.
Run one full plan-or-forecast cycle in the new model with finance side-by-side.
Train finance owners, document the patterns, hand the model over.
Outcomes worth aiming for — what we've seen consistently after a focused planning & EPM engagement. Specifics depend on your starting point; we baseline them in discovery.
Plan, actual, and forecast share a single semantic model. The numbers reconcile because they're literally the same numbers.
Reconciliations, journal workflow, and a close monitor reliably trim multiple days off a typical month-end.
Rolling forecasts updated monthly with a predictive baseline and structured override — not the annual budget repeated four times.
Base, upside, downside, and stress as first-class versions. New "what-if"s in minutes, not days.
The "why" attached to the number — visible in the board pack, the dashboard, and the variance bridge.
A six-to-eight-week engagement that lands a driver-based plan, a rolling forecast, and one production variance report on a unified model — piloted through one real cycle.
Engagements scoped per finance org. Fixed-price options available for foundations work; T&M for build-out and additional cycles.
The questions we get most often during scoping. If yours isn't here, write to info@arkimetrix.com.
No. Our finance clients still live in Excel for input and ad-hoc analysis — Acterys gives them governed write-back from the spreadsheet they already know, into a model the rest of the org reports from. The goal is to keep the Excel comfort and add a real model underneath.
It sits natively on top of Power BI and Microsoft Fabric, which is where most of our clients already report. That means write-back, planning, and reporting share one semantic model rather than three. We work with other EPM tools too — Acterys is a default, not a religion.
Dashboards read. Planning writes. The hard part is letting finance teams change numbers — by version, by scenario, by user — and feed those changes back into the same model the rest of the company reads from. That's what we build.
Yes — that's the default. We bring the modelling patterns and a senior pair-programmer for your analysts. By the end of the engagement, your team owns the driver tree and the documentation.
Usually within the first cycle. The discovery phase alone tends to surface reconciliations that can be retired immediately. The driver tree itself, once stakeholders see it on a wall, often changes the conversation.
A 30-minute scoping call. We'll look at your calendar, your top three reconciliations, and the question your CFO keeps asking. We'll tell you whether we're a fit — and what we'd do first.