A twenty nine year old newly minted FP&A manager for an NYSE listed public company sat in utter bewilderment across CEO and CFO, as the CFO said to CEO, “the most important position in his department is FP&A”.

Ever notice how the personalities and dispositions of animals often resemble humans'? An organisation’s pursuit of adopting FP&A involves personalities of all types. How are they like the creatures that populate our planet? Here is a zoology of analogous types of employees that you might recognise. 

Like many of you, I have spent significant time thinking about 1) What does FP&A do and 2) What should FP&A do?  My team and I landed on this very “packed” vision statement for our finance business partnering group.

Every large organization in the world today, from Apple to P&G and from Ford to Goldman Sachs has a dedicated Financial Planning & Analysis team with bespectacled finance professionals claiming to be “more than mere accountants” or even “value-adding business partners”. What is FP&A and why has it become arguably the most important function in a company’s finance organization?

The Controllership and FP&A are two separate components of the organisation. This article will highlight a couple of differences between the two.

The world of financial planning and analysis has observed changes of such magnitude that they cannot be described by our traditional statistical and analytical models.