Companies reducing the size of their Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) finance teams are cutting valuable resources in the misbelief that is not a priority. That’s untrue. So what’s the role of FP&A in today’s company anyway?
By John Sanchez, Keynote Speaker, Corporate Trainer and Author
According to Google's Chief Economist, Dr. Hal Varian, "The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it— that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades."
Several forces will reshape the way finance will be organized in seven to 10 years. Share your vision and help create alternative models for the future look of the finance function.
By Andrew Codd, Founder and Lead Producer The Strength In The Numbers Show
The author Andrew Codd is the producer of the Strength in the Numbers Podcast which interviews real finance practitioners to break down their hard-won lessons and deconstruct their practical methods that work on the job and which you won't typically find in textbooks or exams so that we create more influential finance professionals worldwide who solve meaningful problems for their organisations and in return have fun, rewarding and successful careers in finance. The great thing about being in FP&A is that we get to observe in real life and hear stories about many interactions, good and bad, between many colleagues across the business.
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”.
At a high level, the best-performing organisations take a more rigorous approach to FP&A. They have tightly integrated all the components of FP&A, merged operational and financial planning, and have a deep understanding of how operational metrics drive their financial results.