13 Must-Have FP&A Skills and How to Get Them

FP&A is a finance function that goes far beyond the figures. FP&A professionals aim to impact an organization by being an effective bridge (and guide) between business strategy and financial reality. That means having a variety of well-honed skills, from financial abilities, to working with new technologies like AI, to communication and more, are essential.

FP&A is a fast-transforming field, and finance professionals either already working in FP&A or aiming to enter the FP&A space soon need to stay sharp, engaged and in a mode of self-education to keep up and get ahead. In this article we’ll look at key skills needed to be effective in FP&A and what you need to do to ensure you have and maintain them.

How to Become a Better FP&A Manager: Change in Mindset

Becoming a better FP&A Manager, or an FP&A professional, isn’t about ticking off a checklist of qualifications. Instead, it’s about the big picture.

Becoming a better FP&A professional is a long-term investment, because it opens up so many opportunities along different paths. There is a reason that so many CFOs talk about the value their time in FP&A had in learning key lessons during their career.

In a sentence: Don’t think numbers. Think impact.

Start with Strategy

Many finance roles are more details-oriented than strategic. That’s not the case with FP&A. Here, the goal is to help the organization achieve its strategic business goals through shrewd forecasting, effective scenario planning, meticulous tracking and agile adaptation.

To succeed in FP&A:

Make sure you are clear on the organization’s long-term strategy and its annual goals. These are not the same, and both are crucial for you to know whether things are on track.
Be a part of making sure finance is building strategy. This includes modeling, realistic budget analysis and processes, the inclusion of financial risk assessment, revenue forecasting and scenario planning.

Look at the Big Picture

FP&A is fascinating and potentially hugely impactful as a profession because of the level of insight into diverse elements of the company that the role includes and then turns into actionable recommendations.

If you’re in FP&A, you shouldn’t be spending all your time with finance folks. Make sure you have a broad understanding of the different departments, their priorities, their goals, and how they are all intended to fit into the strategy of the organization.

Identify, Measure and Track Key Metrics

At the same time as a focus on the big picture, FP&A needs to be firmly grounded in the details. You could think of it as being a bit like a pointillist picture, in which many tiny dots are needed to create the image. If you’re missing some dots, or they’re the wrong color, you’re not going to have the correct impression or end result.

Don’t only focus on finance KPIs; make sure you know the KPIs of other departments as well, and how these impact the results they’re producing. Analyze whether this is producing the right results for the company.
Ensure that essential metrics are being tracked uniformly throughout the organization. Don’t assume; check.
Have time set aside regularly to assess whether any important metrics are being ignored.
Bring all the data together using a dedicated FP&A platform such as Firmbase so that you can understand how things impact one another, produce effective reporting, and make recommendations that are fully grounded in data.
Make sure your data is up to date. Things move very quickly in today’s world; knowing last quarter’s KPIs isn’t going to enable you to stay on track. You want a single source of truth updated in real time.

Excel at Pattern Analysis

The true value of an FP&A professional is in their insight and the ability to translate that into explanations and recommendations. This requires excellent pattern analysis. A report shouldn’t just say what’s happened, it should explain what factors have played into this in which ways, what trends can be seen, and what should be done on the basis of all this.

Automation and AI-powered solutions such as Firmbase’s platform help FP&A teams to both centralize their data and pull out outliers, anomalies and underlying trends. Advocate for getting your team the tools you need to work efficiently and effectively.

Create Effective Reporting

Don’t say that you’re “not a marketing person.” Make sure that you’re communicating what you can see in the data to other people in the company who are less data-savvy and perhaps less comfortable working with raw data or with numbers.

In FP&A, you can’t say that this kind of communication isn’t your job; it’s essential in having the impact that FP&A is supposed to have. It doesn’t matter how fantastic your understanding of the company, its situation and its challenges are if you can’t communicate those effectively to others, and build interest and buy-in around your recommendations.

Build and Communicate Narrative

Beyond reporting is narrative. For your message to really fall on willing ears, it needs to be part of a story that people outside your department can understand, relate to and believe matters.

Crafting the right narrative might take as long as gathering and analyzing the data. That is a good use of time. It’s essential for impact.

Look at Different Scenarios

Scenario planning is a key part of FP&A because, as they say, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. No matter how great your organization’s strategy is, the vagaries and surprises of the real world are going to buffet it once you start putting things into action.

The job of the FP&A team is to mitigate this fact of life by working out in advance a continuum of likely, probable, possible scenarios, analyzing for impact on the business, and thinking through how to adapt in situations from pessimistic to optimistic.

This is another area where financial modeling is essential. Make sure you have a platform to empower you to do this effectively. If you feel you need additional support, training or education to make you stronger in this area, try to access this through your departmental budget. It benefits not just you but the entire organization, in time.

How to Become a Better FP&A Manager Over Time

The skills we’ve discussed in this article so far are tied to the daily work and monthly or annual plans of FP&A teams. There are also some skills that need to be embedded as part of your own personal development and growth. This is something for which you need to take responsibility, or risk falling behind over time.

Keep Investing in Technical Skills

Although we started by saying that FP&A is about far more than figures – and we stand by that – it’s also true that ultimately being effective in this role does require intimate knowledge of the important numbers of your business and industry, and the ability to analyze and work with those numbers in a variety of creative and strategic ways.

FP&A pros do need to stay on top of important changes within finance and standard financial practice, regulations and software. This is a job that can be shared within a team, with different members focusing most on particular areas and sharing their learning in regularly scheduled lunch and learn sessions, or even putting a day aside in the calendar from time to time to ensure everyone has a chance to learn and share.

Stay Abreast of New Tech (Yes, Including AI)

Technological transformation is coming to all levels of business, and in finance that’s certainly true for FP&A.

For example, generative AI has made it possible for teams to use a platform like Firmbase’s to simply type a question from “How much does Marketing have left in their budget this year?” to “How close are we to meeting our ARR goals this quarter?” and much more, and receive an answer complete with relevant data to help guide the right decision. That’s a level of technological innovation that felt like sci-fi just a few years ago.

In FP&A it’s vital to keep an eye on how technology can help you be more effective in your role, how it can help other parts of the business to contribute a shared business and financial understanding, and how it can make the organization as a whole more efficient and productive.

Accept Responsibility For Tracking Through the Year

There’s always a lot of weight on the budgeting process, and FP&A teams play an important role in making sure that it’s done well and realistically. While this is crucial to set an organization up strongly for success in the year ahead, it shouldn’t be a “set and forget” type of activity.

FP&A teams need to take it upon themselves to track budget versus actual variance throughout the year, so that they can identify any issues and course correct as necessary. Failing to do this can have disastrous consequences by the end of the year, further affecting what’s possible in the future.

In the same way, tracking metrics more generally and how closely they are hewing to goals or expectations is vital to make sure that there aren’t unpleasant surprises later on.

Communicate on a Reliable Cadence

Staying on the theme of avoiding surprises, being effective in an FP&A role means reliable communication. FP&A teams need to be in regular contact with key stakeholders and departments across the organization, and that can’t be left to chance.

Consider sending out regular reports to different departments or stakeholders reflecting your analysis of their progress in relation to shared strategic goals.
Hold regular educational lunch and learn sessions in different departments to help widen awareness of FP&A’s relevance and ability to assist.
Have meetings in the calendar with key individuals or teams so that you stay on each other’s radars.
An internal company newsletter with the main successes and challenges of your team is worth thinking about to increase visibility, transparency and personal connections.

Build and Maintain Relationships Across Your Organization

You need the right relationships to be in place for when you need them the most. To do that, you need to invest all the time.

Strategy. Spend time thinking through which relationships in the organization are vital for both your team and you personally, to ensure insight into the company and the ability to impact what’s happening in it.
Cadence. Arrange coffees and lunches as well as professional catch up sessions with the right people, so that you get to know each other as people as well as professionals.
Personal. Aim to spend 2 minutes at the start of appropriate meetings on personal connections, rather than diving straight into business discussions.
Respect. Remember that relationships require respectful communication, and that this is often more important than any particular objective you may have at any one time.
Tailored. It’s not about what you say, it’s about how you say it. Talk to different people in a way that reflects the issues and language that are important to them. Take them seriously, listen to them, and be honest.

Ask the Hard Questions

FP&A teams have an unusual level of breadth of insight into their organization, and it’s their job to use that to benefit the entire company. Sometimes anomalies, problems or questions will arise that are only made possible by this kind of deep, wide perspective.

It can be difficult for some FP&A teams to engage with these issues, because they can feel like confrontation. However, by taking the personal aspect out of it, these can be opportunities to show the value of FP&A in an organization, help uncover problems or gaps that could lead to trouble later on, and build a foundation of mutual trust and respect within the organization.

Don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions.

To Become a Better FP&A Manager, Be Intentional

As we said at the start, achieving must-have FP&A skills and using them to impact the organization in the right and positive ways requires the right mindset.

Becoming a better FP&A manager, or a better FP&A professional, or even a better FP&A team, isn’t something that you’ll fall into. It won’t be handed to you by anyone else, either. It’s something that you need to take on as a project, like any other.

Analyze your current strengths and weaknesses, work out what you need to do to improve, and put concrete steps, processes, technologies and meetings in place to make sure that improvement becomes reality.