Similar to a conductor of an orchestra, the finance team looks at all different functions, allowing some to grow faster at times but never taking eyes off other functions so that every function in the company always performs as one to achieve the best results possible.
Douglas Yeung
Douglas is a partner at Epitelligence Consulting, a management consulting firm specializing in helping startups and mid-stage companies scale up their operations. By implementing the right business processes, these companies are able to gain operational efficiencies and improve profitability while maintaining a high growth model.
Before starting Epitelligence, Douglas spent 20+ years with Fortune 500 companies and startups in various finance and business roles. His industry experience includes software (SaaS), travel, ecommerce, FMCG, industrial automation and telecom equipment manufacturing. He has led FP&A teams for Asia Pacific headquarters in Hong Kong and Singapore and also worked in China and the United States. In addition to finance roles, Douglas has led APAC wide strategy and pricing teams and was appointed interim general manager of a well-known beauty brand’s China business.
Douglas has conducted finance training in different companies and also gave speeches to students at universities in Hong Kong and Singapore to promote a career in FP&A.
Douglas holds an MBA from Rice University, a BBA in Accounting from the University of Texas at Austin and also a BA in Philosophy from Birkbeck College, University of London. He is also a member of Texas Society of Certified Public Accountants.
Author's Articles
Companies nowadays are looking at using specialised FP&A solutions to help improve the accuracy and efficiency of the forecasting process. Depending on the maturity of the FP&A function, we can roughly divide companies into three levels of maturity in terms of their use of specialised FP&A solutions.
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.
When an organisation decides to invest in an FP&A software, there are three things to look for which will help ensure that the software selected will benefit the organisation as a whole, not just the FP&A function.