A Quick Recap - What is FP&A

The objective of FP&A function is to provide actionable advice and financial information to support management decisions. It involves a wide range of activities – from analyzing companies’ performance to Budgeting/ forecasting to business case evaluation to process improvement etc. It gives you a front-row set to make an impact within the organization. 

The Technical side

Being a FP&A practitioner means I can get exposed to various Accounting and FP&A systems and tools eg SAP, DataRails, Excel, Power BI, SQL etc., so to extract actual data, to enhance our budgeting/forecasting accuracy and analytics capabilities and efficiency.

The People element

I particularly enjoy the people element of this role, where we collaborate across the company in different dimensions; from Sales/ Marketing/ IT/ production team to accounting peers to senior management etc, so to enhance communication flow and reduce silo.

We are also storytellers of company financial performances, and I always look for better ways to deliver the message and influence decisions.

The Business dynamics

In FP&A world we constantly find ourselves performing our day-to-day work from both macro and micro perspectives. 

Let’s say when we try to analyse what caused the sales increase in Feb: it would be internally driven, for example, from a marketing campaign, an unfortunate system error etc. Or It would be externally driven, maybe there was unexpected bad news about our competitors. Our job is to consolidate and make sense of those factors and warp up into a summary with actionable advice (it would be a PowerPoint deck, a 1-pager summary). 

All in all, having a GROWTH MINDSET is essential to be successful in our role. We constantly look for better ways to drive companies’ success, optimize profitability or find ways to survive during down times like the pandemic. And I am glad to be part of it!