To the FP&A person, who is new to the profession, I often explain our work as simply as this:

Take all the work and oversight of a highly qualified, high-functioning CFO. Put it into a list. Then take all the responsibilities, experience, institutional knowledge, fiduciary duties, and relationships and sprinkle these traits among a group of teams and people.

This is your high-functioning FP&A team.

Not surprisingly, this is why I advocate that FP&A practitioners are best suited to be CFOs.

While CFOs have responsibility for overseeing financial reporting, custodianship, taxes, transactions, strategy, fundraising, and more, I highlight that there is a clear distinction between oversight of the function and daily management of the function. Daily management tends to fall more to the Controller and FP&A team.

They both report to the CFO, and certainly, there’s overlap between the two. But in this walkthrough, I explain how I frequently observe the duties and responsibilities of Controllers and FP&A to be different.

At the companies I work with, this is my experience. Yet, these roles are sometimes synonymous in certain geographies and industries.