This article focuses on how to ensure that your team adopts business partnering because long-term it is not feasible to maintain quality of the work if you are trying to do it all by yourself. And quality is what makes partnering stick.

As an FP&A professional, one of the key foundation points is to build trust and respect with the business. Trust comes in many forms and is built over time, and is something that cannot be obtained immediately. Respect relies on providing quality and timely outputs that the business can rely on as a trusted partner. 

So how did I get there? This article is a snapshot of Turgut Kapisiz's journey and the steps involved.

The world is becoming automated and robots are taking over. This is the narrative that has been around for a while and has been promoted as the future, but more than ever, the future is now, and we are seeing the automation of transactional and routine tasks at pace.

Does your finance department add true value to the business? Do you see finance influence decision making in your organisation? Is finance always invited to attend strategic business meetings? If the answer to any of the above questions is “no”, it means a transformation from controlling to finance business partnering function is needed.

Both diversity and inclusion are important considerations in the modern finance world. There are clear benefits associated with organisations that are successful in driving this agenda – both in terms of employee satisfaction and also to the bottom line in terms of profit.

Strong programming skills (R, SQL, Python, VBA) are coming up frequently as requirements to be successful in FP&A. Those who have not caught up with this yet need to do so. 

What about strong people skills?