A financial plan is a product used for guiding people’s actions toward the accumulation of wealth. As a product a financial plan is created from a variety of sources. One source used for creating a financial plan is economics.
Business partnering is something everyone is talking about right now. The premise is that the more low-value finance tasks are automated, the more time finance practitioners have to work with their “customers” in the business. The only problem is that many business leaders are far from satisfied with finance’s performance to date as a valued business partner.
Business schools tend to divide their curriculum between hard quantitative-oriented courses, such as operations management and finance; and soft behavioral courses, such as change management, ethics and leadership. This separation of the curriculum is like chambers in a mansion.
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?
This article is my sequel to my previously published “Can Accountants Grow the Beans Too?” article posted this past January, 2019.
Despite some advances in the application of new costing techniques such as activity-based costing, are management accountants and FP&A professionals adequately satisfying the needs of managers and employee teams for decision-based cost information?