As organisations continue to adapt to the world of "Unknown Unknowns", Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) has become increasingly more important. FP&A teams have to be agile and adapt quickly.

Every FP&A professional has an active role to play in business partnering, supporting the leadership team to aid decision making. To enable this, the FP&A team must be positioned to inform the future impact of decisions that are being made now. This requires understanding what the company’s strategy is, where the company is heading, what part your business unit/function play to get there and what are the KPIs on which they are being measured.

The CFO is commonly considered to be the sparring partner to the company CEO. Traditionally this implies a physical vicinity of the finance department to the CEO. However, during my career, I have found more and more finance organisations where remote working is prevalent. I can identify three models.

As an FP&A leader in your organisation be a gentle guide and rigid challenger. Question decisions made with you or just in your presence. Encourage reliance on financial data, not an exchange of opinions.

In this article, I will discuss the challenges finance teams face in Asia Pacific and some insights to how we can manage remote FP&A teams. These challenges are mostly similar to other regions where teams are away from headquarters and scattered in various locations.

In this article, I will share several challenges and dilemmas in building a strong FP&A department and also describe how they can be overcome. I‘ve gone through this process in 3 different companies as a Head of FP&A, so I can give my observation and say what are the crucial conditions to make the FP&A department successful and to minimise the ambiguity.