Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) involves planning, budgeting, financial modeling, and reporting/analysis to help decision-making. FP&A professionals work with management to build budgets/forecasts, prepare financial/strategic plans, and provide performance analysis. Key skills for FP&A include understanding the core business, effective stakeholder management, business communication, and technical skills like financial modeling, budgeting/forecasting, and data analysis.

1. Financial
Planning &
Analysis
By CMA Manish Gupta

2. Basic understanding of FP&A
• What is FP&A ?
• Key responsibilities of FP&A.
• Skills requirement of FP&A
• Core Business Understanding
• Effective stakeholder management
• Business Communications
• Technical skills

3. What is FP&A ?
• Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) is decision making platform that
works around planning and budgeting, financial modelling, and
reporting and analysis.
• FP&A staff has to deal with a lot of data to create value for business.
• It goes through the process of budgeting, forecasting and variance
analysis which are part of routine activity, these are linked with value
chain creation process for organization.

4. Key Responsibilities of FP&A
• Working with business management team to build their annual budgets
and forecasts.
• Interacting with leadership team to prepare business’s financial and
strategic plans.
• Providing detailed analysis and commentary of business units results.
• Creating financial models to project long terms and short terms growths.
• Providing guidance to improve the performances of business.

5. Skills requirement for FP&A
• Core Business Understanding
• Effective stakeholder management
• Business Communications
• Technical skills

6. Core Business Understanding
• FP&A staff can be seen as advisors and finance business partners, hence
it is very important to have core business understanding to work as
FP&A staff.
• It is important to understand how business runs, trading model,
procurement methods, cost drivers, stakeholders, competitors etc.
• If one has the solid knowledge of business and its operations, it can help
to be an effective finance business partner.

7. Effective Stakeholder Management
• A strong working relationship is keen to any roles in business as it build
a strong credibility between the people.
• It is FP&A who does the number crunching, but it is the frontline
employees of business who owns the most insight and business details.
So, if you have build a strong relationship and are connected, you would
be able to understand what is going on in the business.
• While explaining any variances in the performance compare to budget, it
is important to highlight the reason behind it. So it is the business
leaders who can provide you that information. For example, it is
important to know cost of goods sold has increased which resulted in
lower margin.

8. Business Communication
• Effective communication is important to FP&A professionals to
communicate with rest of the organization.
• FP&A professionals do a lots of performance reporting, presentation of
variance analysis to understand the management what is going on in
business from finance perspective.
• As everyone does not understand the language of finance, hence it
become more important to communicate clearly and effectively when
delivering a certain reports, presentations etc.

9. Technical Skills
• There are numbers of technical skills to become an effective FP&A
professional. These skills can be acquired either by experience and
during the studies.
• However, skills acquired during work is more practical.
• These are few skills namely :- Financial Modelling, Budgeting and
Forecasting, Variance analysis, Profitability Management and reporting,
Data Analysis, ROI, NPV etc.
• These are most common skills to learn.

10. Thank you for reading !!!