The daily routine of FP&A professionals revolves around providing reports and analyses for senior and operational management, to manage core processes such as budgeting, forecasting, cost allocation and consolidation. And usually they are hard-pressed for time.
Imagine you have 3 minutes to explain to a six year old what FP&A is and what place it takes in a business ecosystem. Tough, isn’t it? What are things that a six year old would understand? For example, animals, right?
A twenty nine year old newly minted FP&A manager for an NYSE listed public company sat in utter bewilderment across CEO and CFO, as the CFO said to CEO, “the most important position in his department is FP&A”.
Ever notice how the personalities and dispositions of animals often resemble humans'? An organisation’s pursuit of adopting FP&A involves personalities of all types. How are they like the creatures that populate our planet? Here is a zoology of analogous types of employees that you might recognise.
Like many of you, I have spent significant time thinking about 1) What does FP&A do and 2) What should FP&A do? My team and I landed on this very “packed” vision statement for our finance business partnering group.
Every large organization in the world today, from Apple to P&G and from Ford to Goldman Sachs has a dedicated Financial Planning & Analysis team with bespectacled finance professionals claiming to be “more than mere accountants” or even “value-adding business partners”. What is FP&A and why has it become arguably the most important function in a company’s finance organization?