The information age is forcing the office of the CFO into a more data-driven, strategic role away from the back-office accounting role of the past. For CFO’s to be successful, they need their FP&A teams to step out of the data collection and validation and play a larger more strategic, customer facing role.

One of the more important qualities of FP&A practitioners is curiosity. Curiosity, a strong desire to know or learn something, is affected by the types of questions asked. It is the types of questions that determine how much FP&A practitioners want to know or learn. One type of question is “what.”  The purpose of asking “what” is to acquire information. Acquiring information can be in the form of financial numbers like revenues, expenses, and cash flows. Acquiring information can be in the form of non-financial numbers like the amount of time companies receive or make payments. Acquiring information can be in the form of qualitative data like comments from customers, names of products, or types of services provided. Asking “what” helps FP&A practitioners know about the environments where they work but knowing is not enough. FP&A practitioners need to ask questions that help them learn about the environments where they work.

So, you are a C-suite executive, Vice President, Director, Manager, Senior, or Staff financial professional and you just had a high potential and high-performance team member or members move on to greener pastures. Or you aspire to be a high potential and high-performance employee and looking for success factors to take your game to the next level. Well, look no further than this post.  

Less than a quarter of a Financial Analyst’s time is spent with high value-add analysis - this is a finding of a survey run by SAP. Although the survey is 5 years old, it’s still relevant, the percentage may even have shrunk further as the amount of data to be analysed and reported on keeps increasing.

How many of us, when we are asked to a meeting with someone from FP&A, have rolled our eyes, thrown the head back and done a neck roll to relax the shoulders? Why do we have this over whelming feeling of dread when it comes to meeting with that team?

What ignited this article? I was talking with some upcoming college graduates from a similar background as myself. They were looking to go into corporate finance/financial planning & analysis (FP&A) after graduating from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. I shared with them lessons I learned from 10 years in the finance game.