Will You Be a Relevant FP&A Professional 5-10 Years from Now?
Yes, you will stay relevant by keeping your employer relevant. Now work backwards which comes instinctively natural for you — how will you do that?
By Mark Gandy, Founder of G3CFO
Will You Be a Relevant FP&A Professional 5-10 Years from Now?
Yes, you will stay relevant by keeping your employer relevant. Now work backwards which comes instinctively natural for you — how will you do that?
By Dr. Amarendra Kumar, Global Account Finance Advisor at DXC Technology
Dr. Amarendra Kumar is currently working in Pyramid IT Consulting Inc, as a General Manager (Finance) and heading profile of Financial Planning, Analysis & Management Reporting.
There is evidence that FP&A interest is growing fast. Each and every day, CFOs feel the pressure building on the finance function to contribute more to business success. Within the CFO’s organization, the responsibility for tracking, assessing and reporting corporate performance normally falls to the Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) group.
Although it is becoming commonplace to refer to financial planning and analysis as FP&A, this is actually an American term and one that is still not widely used outside of the US. It is true that around the world, FP&A goes by many names.
By Randall Bolten, longtime Silicon Valley CFO, author of "Painting with Numbers: Presenting Financials and Other Numbers So People Will Understand You” and adjunct professor at U.C. Berkeley Extension.
RANDALL BOLTEN grew up in Washington, D.C., the son of a CIA intelligence officer and a history professor. He is passionate about the importance of presenting financials and other numerical information in a cogent and effective way, and in his current life is the author of Painting with Numbers: Presenting Financials and Other Numbers So People Will Understand You (John Wiley & Sons, 2012).
He is a seasoned financial executive, with many years directing the financial and other operations of high-technology companies. His experience includes nearly twenty years as a chief financial officer of software companies.
He has held the CFO position at public companies BroadVision and Phoenix Technologies, and at private companies including Arcot Systems, BioCAD, and Teknekron. Before his CFO positions, he held senior financial management positions at Oracle and Tandem Computers.
He received his AB from Princeton University, headed west to earn an MBA at Stanford University, and ended up staying in Silicon Valley.
In addition to writing Painting with Numbers, he currently operates Lucidity, a consulting and executive coaching practice focused on organizing and presenting complex financial information. He divides his work time between Glenbrook, NV and Washington, DC, and maintains an office in Menlo Park, CA.
You will be considered a great FP&A professional only if you can communicate clearly, effectively, and eloquently. The most basic of those choices is whether a use a table or a graph. To make that choice intelligently, it’s critical that you answer four questions that are described in this article.
By Amrish Shah, CFO at Metabolic
What does it take to become a good or even great FP&A professional?
The article describes those QUALITIES that I have found in people who I have worked with, worked for and who have worked for me in an FP&A domain that I found to be particularly effective in driving the FP&A agenda forward within their responsibility domain.
By Simone da Silva Collins, Senior Financial Analyst at Sony
Simone da Silva Collins is an FP&A professional working in Polycom, an industry leader in unified collaboration solutions.
She provides business partnering to various departments of Polycom in EMEA. She was previously the Group Finance Analyst supporting the Executive Team at Intec (now part of CSG), a provider of Business Support System (BSS) software and related services, primarily for the telecommunications industry. She also worked for Telewest (now part of Virgin Media) for over 7 years providing commercial and financial support to the Interconnect team.
Simone is originally from Macau in SE Asia. She gained her Masters at Manchester Business School. She has also recently achieved FP&A accreditation.
Have you thought of becoming an FP&A professional? When I was studying for my accounting qualification, I assumed I would become a traditional accountant. I did not know then how wrong this assumption would prove to be. This article gives an insight to my path in becoming an FP&A professional and short guide on how to become one.
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