How to Structure Your FP&A Team

Finance leaders need to decide whether to have dedicated FP&A resource within their finance team or to share these responsibilities amongst their existing team.

There are five critical FP&A duties that need to be performed:

1. The Architect: This role requires a good knowledge of what is happening around the business and a detailed understanding how your FP&A team can add value to the wider firm.? You will need to possess a strong vision and excellent problem-solving skills.
2. The Data Scientist: Capturing data and putting it into the right format is a critical success factor towards delivering the objectives of your FP&A team.? You will need to have a good working knowledge of your company’s systems and strong technology skills to automate the process of extracting data into your desired reporting systems and format.
3. The Analyst: Data analysis requires you to scrutinise data and interpret what business activities are driving any trends.? You will need to be good with numbers and to have an analytical mind.
4. The Storyteller: Strong levels of communication and commercial awareness will help you to clearly link the data to the commercials.? Your messaging needs to be convincing and create confidence amongst your target audience.
5. The Influencer: Influencing people to see your perspective and factor in your findings will require many interpersonal skills such as relationship-building, empathy and emotional intelligence.? You also need to be persistent, persuasive and capable of dealing well with conflict.

For more on this topic listen to GrowCFOs FP&A Expert Catherine Marks and Jane Riley from Finance recruitment firm Zanda.

Structuring your FP&A team

There are various ways for finance leaders to build FP&A capabilities within your business.? For example:

1. Allocating FP&A responsibilities to your existing finance team members;
2. Creating dedicated FP&A resource within your finance team; and
3. Placing dedicating FP&A specialists into specific business units.

Allocating FP&A responsibilities to your existing team

Allocating FP&A activities to your existing team members allows you to absorb the cost of an FP&A function within your existing headcount.? It also provides an opportunity to offer additional responsibilities to ambitious team members and to develop new skills amongst your team.

There are various risks to this approach, such as:

• Lacking the relevant combination of skills within your existing team members;
• Having insufficient time available to properly deliver the role; and
• Failing to maximise the value that you deliver to the wider business.

Most experienced finance leaders advocate against this approach, although it may suit businesses in certain situations and with limited budgets.

Creating dedicated FP&A resource within your team

There are many benefits to having a dedicated FP&A person or team within your finance function.? These include:

• Recruiting people with the right skill sets to perform the role;
• Having somebody fully focused on delivering the role effectively; and
• Creating a dedicated point of contact for the wider business.

Strong FP&A professionals are extremely sought after and can be expensive to hire.? However, recruiting the appropriate individuals could have a huge impact.

Placing specialists into business units

This approach is often referred to as a form of business partnering.? It creates opportunities for FP&A specialists to develop robust knowledge of a specific business unit and to build strong working relationships with the key team.?

It can be costly to supply across various business units and carries the risk of adopting different approaches within each business unit.? The strategic perspectives may also be limited if such individuals are always operating within the same team.

A combination of the above

You may decide that various FP&A duties can be performed by existing specialists who sit outside of your finance team. For example, The Architect and Data Scientist duties may be better delivered by cross-functional teams sitting in other parts of your business such as IT or Operations.

This has the added benefit of avoiding the need to recruit people with similar skills sets into different parts of the business, which risks creating silos across your organisation.

Other duties such as The Analyst, The Storyteller and The Influencer may map nicely into your existing finance team or dedicated finance specialists.

Interested in developing your CFO skills further? Attend one of our Future CFO preview events: https://future-cfo-program-preview-events.heysummit.com/