How can FP&A tell management "something they don't already know" and add value to reporting?

Add the "A" back into FP&A.

Example: statistical tools.
-What is "normal" for a given area (eg. rent, or travel). This lets you communicate "normal" and abnormal volatility.
-Given normals, you can do an analysis (using monte carlo or similar tools) of the breadth of possible outcomes even given no out-of-plan variation. This can help execs be more aware of the inherent volatility in multi-variate systems.
-What things are correlated? Can we get some causative implications out of that?
-Are there leading / trailing indicators?
-Do some things (from sales to employee turnover to the cost of tea) show seasonality?
-Do some things simply not fit to a function. Think market volatility. If it is, to the extent we can understand it, truly random, this is an important thing to know.

Statistics is a great way of determining and communicating in a more objective manner the meaning behind the numbers.

KP

Additional ideas...

--Top ten, bottom ten, and short 80-20 lists.
--Cross correlation (time-lagged correlation) can help to identify leading indicators.
--A good source for free economic data (that might correlate with internal measures) is http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/.
--What measures that everyone assumes are correlated turn out NOT to be correlated?
--Are the trends in any key measures changing in unexpected ways?
--In general, what's changing that might surprise or alarm your leaders?
--The DuPont formula could give your senior leaders some convenient rules of thumb about your financial engine.
--Managers understand trends. So whenever possible, give them line charts to illustrate trends in your key measures.
--What categories of your web site tend to generate the most traffic? Are visitors interested in unexpected areas of your site? Are the demographics of your visitors significantly different from the "public" that your leaders have in their minds?

And from another perspective, what information do your sharp, young analysts REALLY wish that your leaders would pay more attention to?

FP&A's task is to convey data to management in a way and format they can clearly see and understand. Traditional reports consisting of hundreds or thousands of pages are never read, let alone understood. The monthly report packets that get distributed to managers on various levels in many companies have little or no value if the data cannot be easily interpreted and used to make timely and sound decisions.

To make a difference you need to:

1) Have access to the actual accounting and operational data in real time
2) Have access to planning and budgeting data
3) Display data from both 1) and 2) above visually and use attributes meaningful to your company (e.g., leading indicators, future period forecasted key financial ratios, etc.).

If you have access to contemporary planning, budgeting and analysis software, you will be able to achieve all that and give management what they really need without inundating them with endless data.

You will find that much of the presentation content will be "something they don't already know", for example: Outlook on future ability to meet loan covenants and by what margin; forecasted key financial ratios and much more. The goal here is always to help management assess the future financial health of their companies and align operations and other business activities with the strategic and financial plan.

If the audience already has a good handle on the day to day operations, what are the key issues in the business? Based on these, present historical context and future action plans highlighting internal and external factors that may cause disruption in plan execution. Create scorecards and identify short term metrics that can be used to make sure plans are on the right path.

I echo Lawrence's comments. You can't explain the numbers until you understand the business. You need to get cozy with the operational line managers so they open up to you about their business.

A variance means very little until you can understand why it happened. Ask the "5 whys." It takes several rounds of "why" questions to get to the real answer.

FP&A can craft a message and lead the direction of budget/ops review meeting with the variance explanations. Your variance comments are discussion starters. What should you be pointing out that is significant and needs further discussion? You can't explain it all with your comments. Keep them brief and to the point.

In FP&A, you are closest to the numbers and should be able to develop the intuition to know what the numbers are trying to tell you. It's not just the current month but also past and future numbers that you need to relate to each other.

Coach your line mangers. They need your help understanding the numbers and linking operations to the financials.

As a practioner and instructor in FP&A, it seems to me the role of the analyst is to identify facts and trends that the decision-makers may not be away of, and present this in a manner that allows the decision-makers to readily grasp the points the analyst sees as important. As others of posted here, the analyst may have the time, that top management doesn't, to really understand the causes of the reported results. Increasingly, big-data type reporting can show us metrics we formerly couldn't get, such as cost of obtaining new customers, correlation among products purchased, time on web pages. Even though these metrics are different from the $ revenue & costs we have traditonally dealt with, the FP&A training could make us the best interpreters of these new metrics as well.

The key, I'm finding, is to understand the perspective and context that the audience exists in. For executives, they not only see the company as a whole including operations, finance, marketing, business development, etc. but they view the business in the greater context of industry and market. You have to find out what's important to them at that level and what FP&A information is meaningful and appropriate to those key issues. When you can provide financial insight on the things that keep them up at night, then you're adding value.

Accurate and more frequent customer and product reporting would certainly add value - as would tracking business drivers and modelling their financial impact to help business leaders make more informed decisions about the future.