The five types of FP&A roles
Image by Anne Nygård via Unsplash
Select the FP&A role that matches your strengths:
#1 Expense- or Revenue-focus
You partner with one or several departments. Your role is to manage the forecast, budgets, and performance reporting for (and with) the department you are assigned to.
This role is most common in medium and large companies.
You do a bit of everything, including financial analysis to support investment decisions and month-end close analysis.
You are expected to build relationships with your cross-functional business partners and ideally become their strategic advisor.
It’s an all-rounder position that sets you up well to transition into various specialized roles. You’ll need both technical and interpersonal skills to succeed.
#2 Consolidations / Reporting
This is a more specialized role. Your objective is to summarize the information you receive from other FP&A teams.
It’s typically found at larger companies that have multiple business units.
This type of job doesn’t include much cross-functional business partnering and typically little involvement in the month-end close process, other than reporting.
On the flip side, you’ll master project management and become efficient at Excel and other FP&A tools since you are managing against tight deadlines.
You can also expect significant leadership exposure since you prepare the information to be most accessible to executives.
#3 Center of Excellence
Large companies further narrow the focus to do a given activity at scale more efficiently.
For example, Unilever, the consumer goods giant, has teams that only focus on the financial analysis of long-term investments of a given product category.
It typically involves financial analysis, planning, and forecasting with varying amounts of business partnering and leadership exposure.
#4 Project Focus
Companies of all sizes may create FP&A positions with a specific purpose in mind. Most common are projects related to digital transformation. For instance, you may be asked to work on implementing a new ERP system or a big outsourcing push.
Typically you’ll need to tightly manage a forecast, budgets, and partner with team members from various functions.
#5 Full P&L
Finally, this role is most common at small companies.
Instead of partnering with just one department, you are managing the financials of the entire business.
This role includes all aspects of the Revenue- / Expense-focus role (#1 above). But, in addition, you typically have more leadership exposure and are included in decisions that impact the entire company.
A challenge in this role tends to be that its breadth makes it difficult to prioritize where to dig into the numbers. You need to truly master the 80/20 approach to succeed in a full P&L FP&A role.
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