What is FP&A and why is it so Ambiguous?

FP&A means different things to different organizations. There is no formal training for other departments to classify what FP&A actually does, and organizations can't seem to align on the standard responsibilities for the team. So, FP&A members get hired to accomplish A, B, and C, then end up assigned X, Y, and Z on top of it. I've worked in FP&A across three different industries now, and each role came with different expectations. Scope creep was real in all of them!

Some companies see it as simply the finance and accounting function. They want someone to manage the P&L and close the books. Others want a hybrid role that handles standard finance duties while also managing the data warehouse and building automated tools for internal stakeholders. Then you have organizations looking for a more technical hire to come in and clean up their data infrastructure and reporting tools. Think Power BI development, Claude expertise, and Excel wizards.

So, what does FP&A really do? I think we're all still trying to figure that out, but the role can sit at any intersection of these three areas.

Finance and Accounting

FP&A's key responsibility is understanding the business's financial situation. This may require them to manage the P&L, develop budgets, forecasts, and the Annual Operating Plan, and manage the books each month. The CEO and CFO rely on forecasts and budgeting to manage the business and evaluate its performance, and FP&A is their trusted partner in planning. Hence the "P" in FP&A.

It makes sense to have one team responsible for company planning. It gives the rest of the organization one source of truth when they question a budget or plan. But the trickle-down effect is real. Your forecasts and budgets impact every department and every decision made within the company, and that is where scope creep begins.

Example: The channels team at an ecommerce company selling on multiple marketplaces comes to FP&A and asks why their AOP is what it is for certain channels. It's on the FP&A team to do the analysis on how they got to that marketplace's number, explain why they calculated it that way, and contextualize it for their audience. An analysis like this can snowball fast. The channels team may follow up with, "Well, what products drove the increase in plan expectation, and why?" That's why it's important to involve each department in the planning period, so there are no surprises when actuals start rolling in and we report against plan. And that snowball effect leads us into the next scope of the role.

Business Intelligence and Analytics

This is the intensive analysis that identifies key trends and areas of opportunity across all departments. Done correctly, it means building automated reports, tools for stakeholders, and internal systems for teams to rely on. FP&A is expected to understand not only the outputs of the numbers but also the inputs behind them.

Example: The Marketing team asks, "How have our last 10 campaigns performed?" Rather than generating an Excel report for a one-time send, a seasoned FP&A colleague would stand up an automated report that stakeholders can refresh on their own with a simple command. Now we're moving out of Excel and into an AI tool or Power BI, and that FP&A member has swapped on their BI and analytics hat.

But a report is only as good as what goes into it. In my experience in corporate roles, data hygiene is critical to successful reporting. Without accurate, contextualized inputs, the outputs may as well go in the trash. They can certainly guide a narrative, but who wants to evaluate their business or make decisions off misguided inputs? FP&A is responsible for accurate deliverables, and the only way to get there is to validate that the inputs fit the narrative being presented to the audience.

Back to the campaign example. A lot of filters, assumptions, and adjustments go into an output the end user can rely on. Are returns and cancelled orders removed from overall GMV? How should we attribute sales to a campaign? Is it based on the timeline the campaign ran, or are there certain touches we need to consider?

So now FP&A needs to understand how finances flow through the business, have the skills to query and build an automated tool, and vet the inputs, sometimes even ingesting their own data sources into the data infrastructure. That leads us into the last scope of the role.

Data Management and Data Engineering

Most organizations have a team responsible for setting up the backend data infrastructure and putting all the company's data sources in one place. That's a lot more work than it sounds like. Depending on the access granted by platforms holding the data, it may even require a direct API connection. And not every organization has this team, some are wrangling data sources manually.

Even when there is a data team, FP&A is likely leveraging the data more than anyone else. They're building reports, dashboards, and analyses for marketing, operations, accounting, logistics, and more. No other team crosses into this many departments, so they tend to be the first to spot a data discrepancy.

When a hygiene issue is identified, they may be able to take it to their data team and work with them until it's corrected. But not every FP&A member has a data team to ask what the numbers mean or where they come from. Sometimes that falls on FP&A. And even when there is a data team, if they're busy or out, people will come to FP&A with data questions anyway, because they're the closest to the numbers. Either way, they're still on a deadline, so they either push it or find a workaround until the data is validated.

Example: Operations asks FP&A, "What's our true cost to ship this SKU?" You pull the number, but your database has a "fulfillment and shipping" field and a separate "carrier fee" field. Is the carrier fee already included in fulfillment and shipping? Or do we add it as its own component in the formula? There's no data team to ask, so it's on you to trace both fields back to their source, compare them against the actual invoices, and confirm what each one includes. Only then can you say the number is correct and in the right context. If you skip that step, you either double count a cost or leave one out, and every margin that rolls up from that SKU is off.

In Summary

FP&A is still novel, and organizations are just now realizing the importance of a dedicated function. Until they agree on what it is, the role will keep being defined by whoever is hiring and whatever lands on FP&A's desk next. FP&A members may be hired for A, B, and C, but X, Y, and Z are coming either way.