The job can be kinda… thankless, can’t it?

It’s not the analysis that’s wearing them down… it’s everything around it. Hunting down the right source data. Cleaning and contorting the data into the format they need. Rebuilding the same analysis they built last month (because the mapping table changed again).

You didn’t hire them to assemble the numbers, you hired them to understand the numbers.

The truth is, we aren’t giving them a chance. I know I’ve been guilty of this as a CFO, too.

And here’s the uncomfortable part: the busywork burning them out is the same busywork making your numbers hard to trust.

Summation takes the assembling off their plate, so your analyst can get back to, well… analyzing. 

Give your analyst their real job back.

PS - Learn more about Summation here.

The CFO said I was about to see ‘poetry in motion’.

We’d just completed a big acquisition. About $1.5b of revenue. A mature business with a sophisticated finance operation and best-in-class systems, (for their time at least): ERP, FP&A software, clean master data management. The works.

This was not some scrappy bolt-on being swallowed by a grown-up parent. It was a huge acquisition. More like a reverse takeover. I wasn’t a CFO yet, but I would be running the post merger integration (PMI) of the two finance functions.

And I’d been told the acquired business had a ‘world class FP&A function’.

I got excited when I heard things like that. I still do. For my entire adult life, I’ve been a student of finance craft. And I’d been told I was about to see the full bells-and-whistles version inside the business we’d just acquired.

Rolling monthly forecasts. Proper integration with Sales & Operations Planning. Monthly performance reviews. Driver-based packs. Clear cadences. Forecast owners. Action logs.

The whole FP&A textbook greatest hits. Like the Beatles Anthology, but for finance geeks…

It was clear we could learn plenty from the business we’d acquired. For the first couple of months, I took notes ferociously. At some point, I would have to recommend (and implement) the right FP&A cycle for the combined business.

When the finance team from our new acquisition asked me about our own existing FP&A cycle, I was almost embarrassed. Ours was more adhoc. More manual. And it certainly had a distinct lack of shine.

Some of the wily old controllers and business unit CFOs literally sneered when I explained how our cycle worked.

As if to say: how dare you be the acquirer of us? It was like Shrek had somehow bought Downton Abbey.

But as the first few months wore on, I started to notice a pattern in the monthly performance reviews.

Every business unit in the acquired business seemed to miss its forecast slightly. Not by much. Just a little… but every month. Then those assumptions would get rolled forward, calling down the forecast a little further.

Key initiatives always slipped by a month or two. Margin was always a few points behind. Volumes were always soft. Costs were always a little sticky. Everything missed by just enough to be explainable.

And soon, the budgeted EBIT growth of 20% or 30% for the year was sliding back toward last year. Then last year minus a bit.

Month by month.

So, I looked back over the previous two or three years worth of performance reviews by business unit to see if this was just bad luck and market conditions. But, no. It wasn’t a recent phenomenon. It was almost part of the game:

Lock in a budget no one really believes. Then use the monthly forecast process to roll it back slowly enough that no one has to own the original lie.

Don’t get me wrong. This wasn’t happening quietly. There were meetings. Actions. Explanations. RAG charts. Even plenty of shouting. But nothing seemed to change. It was performative accountability.

This stellar FP&A process was, in fact, the corporate equivalent of a golfer turning up to the first tee with a brand new TaylorMade driver, Titleist Pro V1s, a breathable performance polo, and golf shoes with more engineering than the Apollo program.

Everything looked magnificent. Until he swung the club and put the ball in the lake… or hit himself on the toe.

One night, a few months in, I was having a beer with Krishna, one of the divisional presidents who’d been around a while. What he said about the busines we’d bought stuck with me:

The point he was making was this: the business had become inverted. The operating company was now working in service of a theoretical planning machine, but no one had stopped to ask whether the machine was helping the business perform.

It wasn’t.

The systems were running the business. And not in a good way. In that moment, I knew what I needed to do: kill the monthly rolling forecast process. And a bunch of FP&A theory with it.

Not because rolling forecasts are inherently bad, but because this one had become a comfort blanket for weak accountability. A monthly ritual that gave the business permission to miss slowly, explain elegantly, and reset expectations without ever changing behavior. Corporate theater.

The business (I mean the real business, not the corporate HQ) needed oxygen. It needed space to focus on what mattered: serving customers, making things, shipping them well, and making money.

Whatever the new FP&A cycle became, it had to serve that.

My approach wouldn’t be popular. And I’d have to flex a lot of muscle during a complex post-merger integration (a political minefield).

But I was confident I was right.

Financial Planning & Analysis is a topic we’ve covered before, including last year’s first ever MEGA series: a nine-part marathon breaking down each individual FP&A process. 

But our recent audience survey made it clear there is still plenty of appetite for more FP&A content. Specifically, how to build and scale an FP&A function.

That made me realize something.

I’ve written a lot about budgeting, forecasting, long-range planning, management accounts, performance reviews, and all the other cogs of FP&A. But I haven’t written much about how you turn those cogs into a machine. How you build those activities into a function. Or how you organize them. And how you build FP&A maturity over time.

So that’s what this series is about… how to build FP&A that is fit for your business.

Not the prettiest FP&A. Not the most sophisticated FP&A. The FP&A your business actually needs.

You can think of it as a partner to last year’s series on Scaling the Finance Function, but with a deeper, more forensic look at FP&A specifically.

We won’t cover old ground. If we’ve been there before, I’ll point you back with a link.

This series is all new space: the purpose of FP&A, how to align it to the maturity of your business, how to match it to your resources, and how to build the right FP&A capability for where you are right now. And where you’re headed.

Let’s start at the start…

One BIG problem with talking about FP&A is that the term gets used so liberally. And to mean so many different things.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen two businesses define FP&A the same way. Different perimeters. Different responsibilities. Different expectations. But we all use the same label.

That’s something I want to clear up in this series. What FP&A is… and what it isn’t.

When finance leaders talk about FP&A, they usually mean the FP&A function.

That makes sense. They are thinking about the people in the business with FP&A job titles: VP of Finance, Head of FP&A, FP&A managers, analysts, and so on.

But FP&A is not just a function. At its heart, FP&A is activity. A set of cycles and processes.

This is not just semantics, because the FP&A cycle creates a metric shit-ton of work. Not just for people with FP&A on their name badge, but for leadership and management throughout the business.

As CFO, you are the one defining that work. That gives you a huge responsibility to define it carefully and ensure it fits your business.

And that means expanding your definition of FP&A beyond the people sitting inside the finance team. You need to look at the whole FP&A cycle, all the work it creates, and all the decisions it is supposed to improve.

You are not just designing an FP&A team or a nice dashboard. Or a few forecast models. You are designing the performance operating system of the business.

Build it badly, and you don’t just waste finance time. You teach the whole business to think badly about performance. Worse, you burn time that they should be spending on performance.

A double whammy.

That framing gives you a much deeper perspective on the trade-offs involved in building the right FP&A for your business.

FP&A exists to help your business improve its financial performance.

That’s it. Not to produce budgets. Not to produce analysis. Not board reports. Not dashboards. Not bridges.

None of those things has any inherent value whatsoever. The value only comes from the extent to which they have an impact on actual business performance.

So a good starting point is this: ALL FP&A has to justify its existence through impact on performance.

The good news is that this should often be easy to do. Even the most basic FP&A cycle, run well, can unlock tremendous value for a business.

But as you saw in the opening story, finance teams can lose sight of that. They start assuming something must be right because it sounds sophisticated. Rolling forecasts. Live dashboards. Integrated planning. Real-time visibility. These are all things that sound wonderful, but without impact, they are pointless.

I’ll be forever grateful to Krishna for those words nearly 20 years ago. He made me think about the purpose of finance differently.

He was describing how the manufacturing operation, the thing the business actually existed to do, felt like it had become an inconvenience to the ‘real’ goal: a perfect-looking back office. It was a proper reframe moment for me, at a formative point in my leadership career.

I remember thinking: ‘Wow, I never want to become so out of touch with a business I’m responsible for that I let something as trivial as a forecast process disengage the whole organization.’ I’ve told that story to my teams many times over the years.

I think FP&A is a bit like the guide runner in Paralympic Visually Impaired sprinting.

The athlete is tethered to the guide, who helps set rhythm, direction, confidence, and correction at speed. But only because they help the athlete run faster and straighter.

The only result that matters is the time at which the athlete crosses the line. Seriously if you’ve never seen this stuff, take a moment, it’s incredible:

FP&A works the same way.

The budget does not become performance. The forecast does not become performance. The dashboard does not become performance. Over a long enough time horizon, all of those things disappear and just get replaced by actual results.

That is what becomes real. That is what investors value. That is what employees live with. That is what customers experience.

So, the test of FP&A is not whether the process looked impressive. It is whether the business performed better because the process existed.

I bang the drum on this a lot because almost all the content aimed at CFOs and finance teams pushes you towards a relentless quest for more in FP&A.

More dashboards. More forecasting. More visibility. More models. More data. More AI. More software. More seats. More consulting work to implement the software. More project teams to fix the mess the first project team left behind. More. More MORE.

And yes, we are seeing the same cycle play out right now with AI:

This is not a coincidence. “More” is a great message if you sell tools, implementation work, or ‘transformation’.

What you really need is better, not more.

True story: Feeling pig sick at hearing this message is one of the reasons I started writing for CFOs in the first place. To bring clarity and perspective to why finance is here, the role we play, and what actually matters. To drown out the commercially motivated noise, and help deliver a clearer message for the CFOs of today and tomorrow.

FP&A can be thought of as seven different types of activity:

Some of this work will be relevant for you. Some of it won’t. Some of it will sit inside your FP&A function. Some of it will sit outside.

Maybe your sales team does its own pricing analysis. Maybe procurement runs its own cost inflation forecasting. Maybe your accounting team runs the performance reporting. That is still FP&A work, wherever it sits.

We are going to go super deep into these seven buckets and talk exactly about what they are for, how you know what you need and when, and how to organize your function to deliver them well.

And maybe you’re reading this thinking: “Our FP&A team spends 80% of its time doing none of those things. Mostly they just crunch ad hoc data requests and slice spreadsheets into slightly different shapes for people who should know better.”

Don’t worry. We’re going to talk about that too.

Oh, we’ll talk about it alright….

Post I. Today, series introduction

Post II. Breaking down FP&A work

Post III. Building the FP&A team

Post IV. The future FP&A function

For now, I have an appeal to you.

No, not an appeal. More of a demand. Please, PLEASE, stop and take a moment to reflect on your FP&A cycle, and ask yourself about the true business impact of the processes you have today.

It’ll be useful as we roll through the rest of the series. This should help you do that:

FP&A is a dangerous label because it can be nebulous and non-specific. A hiding place for performative pet projects. A respectable-sounding wrapper for busy work that gets water cannoned across the business.

The devil is in the details, and as CFO, you own those details.

In the precise design of the cycle. In understanding the different parts of the FP&A Activity Stack. And in building the right version for your business, your team, and your maturity stage.

Next week, we’ll get deeper into all seven parts of the FP&A Activity Stack and how to diagnose what you need and what you don’t.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Thank you to our sponsor ::
:: Summation ::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

If you enjoyed today’s content, don’t forget to subscribe.

Disclaimer: I am not your accountant, tax advisor, lawyer, CFO, director, or friend. Well, maybe I’m your friend, but I am not any of those other things. Everything I publish represents my opinions only, not advice. Running the finances for a company is serious business, and you should take the proper advice you need.