FP&A: Assessing the Value
Despite AFP’s current focus on the US, attention is likely to increasingly extend beyond North America, notes director and finance practice lead Brian Kalish. “Everything we’ve done to date has been roughly 75% US and 25% rest of the world, but those percentages will likely be reversed over the next few years as FP&A gains hold in countries such as Korea,” he forecasts.
Calculating the value of FP&A was a topic returned to regularly in the discussions. Kelly Myrick, finance director for AT&T’s Cricket Wireless, acts as an advocate for it within his group. He believes that as professionals start sitting the
FP&A exams
they will increasingly recognise its relevance to their job role and it will increasingly gain momentum.
“It’s far more relevant than the certified public accountant (CPA) qualification, which unless you’re an accountant is only of limited value,” he suggests.
However, T.J. Wood, who is director, finance integration for CHEP and was formerly a finance director for Johnson & Johnson, adds that the CPA certification is still in great demand as it is universally recognised. She also believes that the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), the worldwide association for accountants and financial professionals, “could do a much better job of promoting itself and emphasising its value”, particularly to college students.
Kalish says that he and his team have talked with many students around the US on qualifications, but agrees that “schools have to get excited about FP&A, particularly as the template for areas such as predictive analysis.”
Wood says that many of today’s financial professionals face a common challenge in their workplace; that of having to tackle increasing complexities in their role and doing so with fewer people as their company steadily cuts costs.
At the same time, employees who can be categorised as millennials or Generation Y – those born post-1980 – are having a “significant impact” on corporate workforces. “They don’t want a working week of more than 40 hours, although at the same time they do expect the same salary,” notes Wood.
A Seat on the Board
Kalish raises another FP&A-related topic that regularly features in discussions; that of business partnering. “How do you [as an FP&A professional] get a seat at the board table?” he asks. “What happens if your employer wants recourse to you 24/7?”
Ginger Bless, of rental store chain Aaron’s, says that her company has seen several changes of chief executive over the past couple of years but has now been able to sit down with its newest CEO, “who wants treasury to provide a good forecast and to be able to report against it.”
Her verdict is as follows: “You want to have a seat at the table and for people within the company to come to you.” At the same time it can be difficult to determine exactly where the line is that separates FP&A from business intelligence (BI) or data analytics.
For Brian Dykes, strategic business analyst for parcel delivery giant UPS, it’s a different situation. “UPS has a number of advanced analytics individuals and groups and we’ve centralised our data repositories,” he reports.
“At the same time, we’re struggling with how to create a competency centre for all of these individuals with differing skill sets, so that we can allocate a specific project to the right individuals.”
Colleague Patti Humble, UPS’s director of corporate planning, notes that each part of an organisation brings its own analysis and perspectives on what is needed to raise it to the next level. “It’s FP&A’s role to pull all of those disparate pieces together,” she suggests.
Discussion also turned to ensuring that the FP&A examinations are what Kalish describes as “tough enough” to have value.
“We have to be able to prove – in court if necessary – that each question in the exam is there because the global FP&A community says that it should be there,” he suggests.
“Also, we don’t want anyone taking the exam who doesn’t have a reasonable chance of actually passing it. Someone with three to five years’ experience should have a 50% chance of passing it on the first attempt.”
Learn more about AFP’s Certified Corporate FP&A Professional credential here.