What Is FP&A Business Partnering?

As finance functions around the world have been transformed to run very efficiently by utilizing Global Shared Service Centers in low-cost locations, companies are starting to demand more effectiveness from the finance function. Essentially, Finance is now doing things right but not necessarily doing the right things or rather enough right things. Finance is tasked with delivering better Business Intelligence and more importantly better insights to influence decision-making in the right direction and creating an impact on company performance. At the center of this shifting demand is the FP&A function which needs to deliver better analytics but also needs to partner with business stakeholders. While always an analysis function it’s much more challenging to develop meaningful relationships with stakeholders as it requires completely different skills vs. the traditional role of FP&A. To help facilitate this change we will take a closer look at the term “Business Partnering” and explore what it means for the FP&A function. 

“Business” and “Partnering” 

Let’s then disseminate the two key terms and discuss what they really mean. 

Business: Seems obvious that this is about the company you work for and the industry it competes in. Too often though FP&A professionals have been occupied with purely looking at the numbers rather than connecting them to a business context. A trend is a trend regardless if you sell flat screens or ice creams? However, these are two completely different markets and the production, supply chain, marketing etc. all function in different ways. Hence, to build a relationship of trust with your stakeholder irrespective of what function they work in you need to understand what they do. We will explore tips and tricks to learn about the business in a later blog post. 

Partnering: To partner with someone you need trust. Without trust, there’s no partnership. That holds true in business as it does in your private life. To establish trust with any given stakeholder you can analyze what elements of the trust equation you need to work on. The elements are Credibility, Reliability, Intimacy less Self-Orientation. Often FP&A professionals find it hard to build intimacy with others yet it’s important to remember that being intimate with someone doesn’t mean being private with them. Rather you can connect on a personal level talking about some experiences you’ve had together or a common interest. Most importantly, you need to know the profile of your stakeholder. Some like small talk whereas others just want you to deliver your recommendation in 30 seconds or less. Once you have figured out how to build a relationship with your main stakeholders all you need to do is to increase your interactions with them be it in a formal meeting or at the coffee machine. We will also explore the tools for how to build partnerships in a later blog post. 

It's difficult to be a good business partner if you fall short in either of the two categories and there are no shortcuts really to becoming good at it. It takes hours and hours of work and practice but you got to start somewhere. 

Business Partnering in the context of FP&A 

FP&A is often a corporate function that delivers analyses to senior management hence tend to work more at a strategic level rather than at the operational or tactical level. That means you need to understand the strategy of your company and challenge strategic decisions. You also need to partner with both senior leaders as well as frontline functions that deliver critical inputs to your planning and analysis. Senior leaders are short on time and leave very little room for errors. Hence, FP&A Business Partnering differs from Finance Business Partnering on the level of the stakeholders to deal with as well as operating at the strategic level. In a later blog, we will look at how the FP&A function use business partnering to improve company performance at the strategic level. 

To understand the challenging part about being successful with business partnering in the FP&A function then try and remember the last time you showed up with wrong numbers in your management presentation or made a forecasting error that led to a wrong a decision. We’ve all tried it but never really thought about how much it damaged your partnership with the management team. Had you only had the business understanding to know that your numbers clearly didn’t fit with what happened in the business during the last month or that your forecast clearly wasn’t realistic. Now that you know you can get started on building trustful relationships and help your company improve business performance. 

In conclusion, what’s important to know about Business Partnering is that you need to find ways of increasing your business understanding in addition to building relationships with your key stakeholders through establishing trust. By doing this you will be able to leverage your FP&A skills and your FP&A team in a completely different way which will boost value creation in your company.

If you want to learn more about FP&A Business Partnering then join us at AFP 2018 in Chicago for our session "How Do You Become a Great Finance Business Partner?", where we will present ways to acquire the skills to become a business partner. We will also help you start to build a business partnering framework that details why business partnering is necessary, where business partnering can create value, what activities make the best use of your time, and how business partners deploy their skills and competences to create an impact.

The article was first published by Prevero at prevero.com and is the first of six in a series about how FP&A can leverage business partnering to drive value creation.

I encourage you to take a tour of my past articles on finance transformation, finance business partnering and not least “Introducing The Finance Transformation Nine Box” which is really the starting point for the transformation. You should join our 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 him on Twitter.

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Anders Liu-Lindberg is the Head of Global Finance Program Management Office at Maersk 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 5,000 members. My main goal at Maersk is to create a world-class finance function not least when it comes to Business Partnering. I am the co-author of the book “Skab V?rdi Som Finansiel Forretningspartner” and a long-time Finance Blogger with 21.000+ followers.