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The FP&A (financial planning and analysis) Agent supports finance teams with financial planning, variance analysis, root-cause analysis, and narrative commentary. It helps users move from static reporting to guided analysis. It can explain business drivers, support financial statement review, and help users understand what changed, why it changed, and what to review next.
This article covers:
💡Causal analysis
What the FP&A Agent does
The FP&A Agent supports financial planning and analysis across the Financial Statements.
The FP&A Agent can help users:
Analyze variances.
Identify root causes.
Keep financial statements aligned.
Use external drivers in analysis.
Create narrative commentary.
Support review and decision-making workflows.
Key capabilities
The FP&A Agent helps users analyze financial performance and explain the main drivers behind changes.
Capability | What the FP&A Agent does |
|---|---|
Variance analysis | Analyzes differences between scenarios, such as Actual, Budget, and Forecast. |
Root-cause analysis | Helps users identify the drivers behind financial changes. |
Financial statement alignment | Supports analysis across balance sheet, P&L, and cash flow. |
External driver analysis | Uses relevant business drivers to enrich financial explanations. |
Narrative commentary | Helps create clear commentary for review and decision-making. |
💡Causal analysis
Versions prior to Board 15.1, the FP&A Agent doesn’t support Causal analysis.
The FP&A Agent can support causal analysis which helps users move beyond variance reporting. The Agent uses a chain of analytical steps to connect movements in revenue, cost, and margin to their drivers.
Capability | What the FP&A Agent does |
|---|---|
EBITDA variance analysis | Breaks down EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) changes into drivers, such as volume, price, mix, and cost. It ranks each driver by impact across legal entities and periods. |
Causal chain reasoning | Guides the analysis from summary to root cause. The user does not need to rewrite each question. |
Executive summary | Creates a concise summary that users can review and use in business discussions without additional formatting or manual interpretation. |
How the FP&A Agent and Controller Agent work together
The FP&A Agent and Controller Agent can work together on consolidated financial statements.
The Controller Agent supports consolidated actuals, eliminations, FX (foreign exchange) translation, and NCI (non-controlling interest). The FP&A Agent can use this governed foundation to check cross-statement coherence, explain performance, and support forecasts.
Capability | What the FP&A Agent does |
|---|---|
Cross-statement coherence | Check that P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow tie out across consolidated actuals before review and disclosure. |
Group performance analysis | Analyze consolidated performance against plan across all three statements. Attribute variances to drivers such as volume, FX, margin, and working capital at group and Entity level. |
Consolidated liquidity and scenarios | Forecast consolidated cash flow and liquidity. Simulate funding or working-capital actions on the consolidated balance sheet. |
Consolidation governance | Review account structures, mappings, and reporting logic to support accurate and consistent financial outcomes. |
Reconciliation intelligence | Identify meaningful exceptions and reduce manual investigation during reconciliation. |
Close validation and insights | Review data collection and validation results with accounting-aware logic. Surface inconsistencies, root causes, and bottlenecks. |