Helping FP&A Professionals provide value to their businesses | Founder of The FP&A Guy | Host of 3 popular Finance podcasts | Microsoft MVP
I am curious for those of you working in FP&A what part do you find hardest in your job? Let me know in the comments For me it was balancing managing the business relationships and collaboration with the often overwhelming workload as I tried to clean up data and processes. This is one reason I am such an advocate for technology and upskilling ourselves as they can both help us focus more on the value add activities.
Reece Adams, CFA
11mo
For me it was driving ownership of the numbers with budget owners. A lot of the time people see budgeting and forecasting as a chore, whether due to external pressures (Management cutting out "necessary" expenses so why put thought into it) or a cumbersome process. The same can be said of the output of the whole process, because either there is no incentive for providing accurate figures when building out the budget/forecasts or there is no accountantibilty (I missed due to topdown intervention) when actuals don't allign. If all the budget owner is getting is a file which is a hit or miss of my targets which I put no effort into the first place, then how can I be expected to invest my time/effort in diving deeper when the basis of this whole excercise was a chore to begin with.
Olivia MacDonald
11mo
Creating a separation between me and the numbers. I would say *my* forecast did this or that and could spend hours trying to find a few dollars to bring it back into line. I got very attached to the idea that if I was off by X, I was potentially impacting someone's job if that was the gap we needed to close by year end
Mine is the opposite of @olivia macdonald it is ti make the forecast everyone’s. People keep saying it is the FP&A forecast even if they provided the numbers 😒
Noura Zein
11mo
I see Managing stakeholder expectations and effectively communicating financial insights to non-finance teams can be challenging because it requires translating complex financial information into easily understandable terms. It's important to ensure that everyone is on the same page and has a clear understanding of the financial implications.
Prakash Srinivasan
11mo
It's really challenging to deliver FPNA metrics in full potentialities, when we are bound to perform non FPNA activities and landing up in supporting peer teams misses and gaps. Even if it's managed, then it will affect the collaboration with peers network quotient. The biggest challenge is taking bottom up approach in budgeting and forecasting where we have to spend alot of time and effort to get it through with the stakeholders.
Paul Barnhurst, The FPandA Guy The biggest challenge had always been to make a credible plan with the business leaders. While they are eternally optimistic it's our job to reflect the picture on the ground which sometimes lead to very difficult conversations n sometimes take a different turn. I'm sure you all know what I mean. The next thing is to make the business accountable for the plan as sometimes they see it as a pure finance driven exercise.
Antto Eronen
11mo
One of our challenges is optimizing the time frame for value creation. The extremes are: 1) Full focus on business support outside of standard deliverables 👉 immediate benefits 2) Full focus on various developments (tool stack, master data) 👉 enhanced business support at scale in the future
Valuations | Financial Modelling | FP&A | Corporate Finance | Strategy | M&A
11moPaul, I remember one of the hardest thing for me was having the "One source of truth" (which is something I continue to get my clients to focus on today). I highly recommend FP&A folks take the opportunity to become an expert in their industry (not just the numbers). Become the GOTO person for understanding how your industry works, how your company compares to peers and how all your numbers stack up against your peers. If you can explain that to the non-finance people in your company, you will be highly valued. 💯