A Business Partner’s Love-Hate Relationship With Details

As a business partner, you’d like to get involved in strategy, strategizing, big decisions, and value creation. You likely wouldn’t like to sit all day long in front of your screen digging into a ton of details in a spreadsheet. Am I right?

The question is can you be a business partner without knowing and some time studying the details? I don’t think you can, so the challenge is to get the balance right. That’s what we’ll discuss in this next lesson in “Business Partnering from the Trenches”.

Despite not producing data or reports a business partner’s stronghold should be in the numbers and as soon as your business stakeholders know the numbers better than you they’ll start to question why you’re in the room at all (or maybe why you work in Finance and not in the business). So how do business partners work with numbers and details? 

The challenge is knowing where to look 

It’s not because we lack information and reports that we cannot be good business partners. Rather it’s because we haven’t developed an effective mechanism for digging into the right details and extracting insights from them.

Ideally, you must create a setup where your reports give you a high-level overview of the business and tell you the key variances you must look at to understand what’s happening. If every month you need to explain every line item down to the last details, you’ll never succeed with business partnering.

From knowing where to look you need to have tools that can provide you with a fast drill-down or alternatively know your function well-enough to know whom to ask for help. 

Bring it down to earth and show me the details of what you mean, please? 

Fair enough! Let me give you some examples of my daily work. 

• In a certain period, we couldn’t understand why our fuel costs in the P&L didn’t develop in line with the fuel costs in the market. This was visible from the high-level reporting. I tried doing correlation analysis between different elements and applied a delay factor too. Nothing seems to be able to explain it. Instead, I turned to the cost experts and asked them to do a deep-dive. Through the deep-dive, we developed a much better understanding of the issue and could focus our efforts elsewhere.
• One of the other places we were seeing some issues were on our imbalance costs (imbalance is when imports and exports into a certain location are not even). In one month we saw a sudden spike which couldn’t be explained by any high-level drivers. This time I immediately turned to the cost experts but didn’t get the answers I wanted hence I ended up doing the detailed review myself and understood what the root causes were. This analysis allowed us to change business decisions and bring down costs again.
• A final example has us looking at the difference between the offline shipping rates we were offering and the online rates. We wanted to understand what the true difference between the two was. The complication was that we were offering some discounts on our offline rates which we didn’t do on our online rates. We tried doing a bottom-up calculation, but the results were way off compared to what we recorded in our P&L. So what number was the right one? Again, I turned to the experts within our function to get a view. We were able to identify many of the differences. Although we didn’t get all the answers we decided in the end to ditch the bottom-up calculation and simply go with the P&L result. 

The learning from these three examples is that sometimes you need to dig into the details to make the right decisions. Either you do it yourself or you know whom to turn to. Regardless the work must get done and you as the business partner need to own it. 

Everyone expects you to best understand the details but the same time they expect you to offer strategic support and drive performance management. It’s a tall order to be a business partner and you can’t afford to spend too much time in detail. Still, if you don’t you cannot be successful.

What’s your approach to understanding the details? Do you think you spend too much or too little time on them? Have you ever experienced that not knowing the details meant that you were unsuccessful in your job? If you have a story from the trenches that you would like to share, then don’t hesitate to reach out. I would love to feature it as part of this series.

This was the third article in the series “Business Partnering Lessons From The Trenches”. You can read previous articles below.

Business Partnering Lessons From The Trenches

Successful Onboarding For Finance Business Partners

You can read a lot more articles about FP&A, Business Partnering, and Finance Transformation below. It all start's with “Introducing The Finance Transformation Nine Box” where you set the ambition for your transformation. You should join the Finance Business Partner Forum which is part of the Business Partnering Institute's online community where we will continue to discuss this topic and you can click here to follow me on Twitter.

Why Did You Become A Business Partner - Ranu Sharma

Your Journey To Successful Business Partnering Explained

How To Create Value Through Business Partnering

Everyone Can Adopt A Business Partnering Mindset (part of a six-article series about FP&A Business Partnering)

From Business Partner To Working Within The Business (part of an article series where I interview finance professionals about their careers in FP&A and Business Partnering)

Is Your Product Optimized For Value Creation? (part of a toolbox series where we look at what tools FP&A professionals should leverage to drive value creation)

How Business Partners Turn Analysis To Insight (part of case study series where I interview business partners about how they drive value creation using real cases)

The Future Of FP&A: Two Ways To Take The Reins

What Is The Accounting Profession Paradox?

What Defines A Finance Master?

The New Career Path For Finance Professionals

How Finance People Can Be More Successful

The CFOs Roadmap To Transforming Finance

How To Become A Finance Business Partner

Financial Analyst vs. Finance Business Partner

Finance Business Partner Is A Bullshit Job

How Business Partners Keep A Plan On Track

Anders Liu-Lindberg is a Senior Finance Business Partner at Maersk supporting our largest product and I have more than 10 years of experience working with Finance at Maersk both in Denmark and abroad. I am also the co-founder of the Business Partnering Institute and owner of the largest group dedicated to Finance Business Partnering on LinkedIn with more than 7,000 members. My main goal at Maersk is to show how to be successful with business partnering and drive value creation as a trusted partner. I am the co-author of the book “Create Value as a Finance Business Partner” and a long-time Finance Blogger with 36.000+ followers.