The Role of FP&A vis a vis Revenue Operations - with Paul Barnhurst, The FP&A Guy

You may have heard the acronym FP&A many times, but always wondered what it stood for?  Financial Planning and Analysis is the function, typically present in more mature companies responsible that is responsible for financial planning, modeling and analysis.

Paul has a summarized view of what FP&A professionals are responsible for which is: "FP&A  is responsible to maximize shareholder return by helping businesses to best deploy and allocate future dollars".

Where does FP&A start and end, versus the Revenue Operations function?  Well, the answer was clear as mud. Paul shared that each company defines FP&A and RevOps differently,  Some companies have "operations" report to the CFO and some to the Chief Revenue Officer.  The primary answer was "planning and modeling" goes into FP&A, and the rest of operations depends on the culture and competency within a company.

Forecasting was another topic that is sometimes responsible for forecasting and others FP&A simply validates the Sales provided forecast, but not to create and share the forecast.  Basically, can FP&A use historical financial data toreview and validate the forecast.

I drilled down into how FP&A departments become involved with "SaaS Metrics" in the SaaS industry.  Paul likes to see CFOs as the primary owner of the data that drives SaaS Metrics to ensure that the input data and the enterprise value creating metrics are standardized. Basically, not having the Go-to-Market functions own the SaaS Metrics formula definition, but can collaborate with FP&A in the calculation of the metrics using the "Finance" approved definition and calculation formula.

If you are involved in the financial planning, modeling and reporting process in your SaaS company, and already have or are evaluating introducing a FP&A function that will work closely with the GTM operations teams (Sales Ops, Marketing Ops, CS Ops and/or RevOps) this conversation is a great listen!

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