Historically, due to legal and regulatory requirements, financial information has always been available in a company. Being the fiscal authorities, the stock markets and stock market regulators, the national statistics offices or even the national banks, companies need to prepare statutory accounts. In most of the companies there might be also management accounts available for the internal (decision making) needs.

In other areas, however, the information is most of the time non-existent, scarce, obtained and acted upon in non-systemic manners.

Also, the financial information is by it's nature more of an effect oriented type of information and less of a cause oriented type of information. The performance (or lack thereof) is signaled by events, phenomenon and changes taking place in the entire organization and environment, sometimes visible long before we see the financial information. Future projections (like budgets) should not be confused which such signals as they only express wishes and are used like steering instruments.

To complement the financial information (which also should not be left outside) a tool such as the Balanced Scorecard was created, increasing awareness about three other, considered fundamental, dimensions (or directions) in which a business should look in order to understand it's performance (customers, learning and growth (or development) and internal processes).

For an FP&A professional, especially if they are used working only with financial KPIs, this course might be an eye-opener. For the others it is a good exercise in understanding the complexity of the modern organizations.