Most organisations of any size run four financial plans. Profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow, liquidity. Each one is maintained properly. Each one is defensible on its own terms.
The problem is not that they disagree. Usually they do not, because they are never held next to each other long enough to disagree.
A plan is a set of assumptions about what happens. When you run four of them in separate logics, you are running four sets of assumptions, and only the people inside each one know what those assumptions are. The person modelling liquidity assumes a payment behaviour. The person modelling the balance sheet assumes an investment schedule. Neither assumption is wrong. Neither one is visible to the other.
So the four plans do not conflict. They simply do not know about each other, which is worse, because a conflict would at least surface.
You notice it at the decision, not in the plan. Someone proposes moving a large investment by one quarter. In the P&L view it is close to neutral. In the liquidity view it is the difference between comfortable and tight. If those two views live in different files owned by different people, the person deciding sees one of them, and which one depends on who was in the room.
The test is short. Take one real decision from the last quarter, something with money and timing in it. Then ask, for each of the four plans, in what way that decision is visible in it.
Where a decision shows up in all four, the planning is integrated regardless of how many files it lives in. Where it shows up in one, you are not steering the company. You are steering the view that happened to be open.
Cordula Buss · Plan A2C · Helping finance and programme leaders build steering logic that works.