How to Build an FP&A Team: Structure, Roles and When to Hire

As a company grows, the questions put to its finance team change. The board stops asking only what happened last quarter and starts asking what will happen next: how much cash the new hiring plan uses, what a price change does to margin, whether the forecast still holds after a big customer pays late. Financial planning and analysis, or FP&A, is the team that answers those questions.

This guide is for the CEO or CFO deciding when to hire the first FP&A person and how to grow the team after that. It explains what FP&A does and how it differs from accounting, when the first hire usually makes sense, which roles to add in what order, how the structure changes from early stage to enterprise, and how to judge the people you hire.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan co-founded Alpha Apex Group, which is mentioned in this article.

What an FP&A team does, and how it differs from accounting

FP&A is the forward-looking side of finance. Spendesk's write-up of a 2022 startup finance panel (opens in a new tab) lists four pillars of the work: budgeting, financial planning, management and performance reporting, and forecasting and modeling. Oracle NetSuite's guide to FP&A (opens in a new tab) puts the difference from accounting simply: FP&A "primarily looks ahead", while accounting records what happened.

The controller is the role closest to FP&A, and the two are easy to confuse. The Corporate Finance Institute (opens in a new tab) describes the controller as the person who prepares the financial statements and keeps reporting accurate and compliant, and the CFO as the executive who typically oversees both the controller and the FP&A function.

Image

Zoom

Original comparison based on Corporate Finance Institute’s explanation of accounting, controllership, and FP&A responsibilities.corporatefinanceinstitute.com (opens in a new tab) · spendesk.com (opens in a new tab) · netsuite.com (opens in a new tab)

The last row matters for timing. FP&A builds on the books. If the monthly close is late or unreliable, strengthen accounting first so an FP&A hire has dependable inputs.

In a PwC Pulse Survey fielded in May 2024 (opens in a new tab), 58% of the 84 CFOs who responded said they were dedicating more time to FP&A and business performance management than a year earlier.

When to hire your first FP&A person

There is no revenue or headcount figure that settles it. On that Spendesk-reported panel at the 2022 CFO Connect Summit, Paul Mondollot of Aircall said companies should hire dedicated FP&A professionals after a Series A or B round, depending on their size, and that one or two FP&A people may be needed early, before the rest of the accounting team.

Chloé Giraut of Pigment suggested that a startup's first finance manager be an FP&A professional, who can help build the business plan, track performance against budget and produce the P&L and cash flow statements.

That is practitioner advice from one panel. In a company that small, one person may cover both jobs, as the Corporate Finance Institute also notes below; once accounting has its own people, the earlier test applies, and FP&A needs books that close on time. It fits the wider point: the first dedicated FP&A hire earns its place when investors and a growing team start asking for a plan as well as a set of accounts.

The better test is what the leadership team cannot answer today. These signs suggest the work has outgrown the CEO's spreadsheet and the controller's spare time:

• The board or investors ask for forecasts and scenarios that take you days to assemble.
• The budget is built once a year and nobody checks it against actual results until the next one.
• Hiring, pricing or expansion decisions are made without a model of what they do to cash and margin.
• A cash shortfall surprises you, and you cannot tell straight away whether the cause is a loss or a slow payer.

That last sign deserves weight. When a growing business starts selling to large customers who pay on net 60 or net 90 terms, you can't tell a loss from a slow payer (opens in a new tab) without proper financial visibility, and enough late payments at once can stretch the business further than anyone planned. A forecast that tracks cash, not only profit, is what makes the difference visible.

If you need senior judgment before you need a full-time team, a fractional CFO can build the first plan and model, and the first FP&A hire can follow. Fractional CFO firms compared covers that option.

Which FP&A roles to add, and when

Titles vary from one company to the next, but most FP&A teams are built from the same few roles. The order below is this guide's advice; your own order should follow the decisions the business is facing.

Image

Zoom

The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

Many teams also plan by skills as well as by headcount. An FP&A Trends article on building FP&A teams (opens in a new tab), from a December 2023 webinar, named five roles a leading team should have: the analyst, the influencer, the storyteller, the data scientist and the architect. The panelists stressed that FP&A people often wear several of these hats. One of them, Natasha Rathee, recommended starting by auditing the skills the team already has, then defining the ideal structure and filling the gaps through hiring and upskilling. That is a sound order for any company adding its second or third FP&A person.

How FP&A teams are structured as a company grows

The structure follows the company's complexity more than its age. The Corporate Finance Institute describes the progression in three steps: a startup may have a single finance manager handling reporting, forecasting and even cash management; a mid-size company will likely hire a controller and an FP&A lead to own the planning process; a larger enterprise has FP&A teams segmented by function or geography. The table below illustrates that progression. Choose the structure that fits the units, products and markets your plan covers.

Image

Zoom

The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

How big should the team be? Two published examples illustrate lean FP&A staffing in 2022. At the same 2022 panel, the finance team at Pigment was three people, 1.5 of whom did FP&A: an FP&A manager and part of the CFO's time. Aircall's finance team had 20 people, most of them in accounting, with four dedicated to FP&A for a company of 800 employees. Both are figures from 2022, and the article reporting them calls the structure "highly individualized".

As the company grows, the main design choice is how centralized to keep the team. A central team keeps one planning process, one model and one set of assumptions. Finance partners embedded in business units are closer to the decisions and the operating data. A workable answer for a larger company is both: a central team that owns the process and the consolidated plan, and partners who own each unit's numbers within it.

How to hire for FP&A

1. Learn enough of the job to judge the hire

Before you hire anyone to run planning, get competent enough in it to judge their work. As I said on a podcast in 2025, "there's some level of competency you need in all aspects of the business to be able to hire someone effectively (opens in a new tab)." I went through several painful finance hires before I took the time to learn finance myself. By the time I was looking for a new fractional CFO, I knew what to look for, and I wanted to see their model.

For a first FP&A hire, that means asking every finalist to walk you through a model they built: the drivers, the assumptions they would change first and how they explained a miss to leadership.

2. Define success before you interview

Before you interview, write down what the new lead must have delivered by day 90. On my podcast in 2020 I put it as a simple question: "what are the criteria that this person needs to have achieved in 90 days out from now?" Without that definition, a new hire is left waiting to be told what to do.

For a first FP&A lead, a 90-day definition might include a monthly forecast the leadership team actually uses, a budget-versus-actual review on a fixed date each month, and a cash forecast that would have caught your last surprise. These are examples; write the ones that fit your company.

3. Set the skills and qualifications

The technical base is consistent across sources. NetSuite's guide says FP&A staff "need to be proficient in Microsoft Excel or a similar tool" and comfortable with ERP systems. Beyond the tools, the role needs someone who can explain numbers to people who are not in finance, because the analysis only helps if leaders act on it.

The FP&A-specific credential is the Association for Financial Professionals' Certified Corporate FP&A Professional (FPAC) (opens in a new tab), whose exam has two parts. Treat it as a useful signal alongside evidence of modeling, analysis and communication skills.

4. Plan for a competitive search

Expect the search to take time. In Robert Half's 2024 research (opens in a new tab) with US finance and accounting hiring managers, 87% said they were having a hard time finding skilled talent, and 46% said it was tough to find skilled talent for FP&A roles. Robert Half is itself a staffing firm, so read the figures as one recruiter's survey. For senior or hard-to-fill roles, a recruiter that specializes in finance can widen the pool: accounting and finance recruiters compared covers the options, and the CFO playbook covers the hire above the FP&A lead.

How to tell whether the FP&A team is working

Four measures, reviewed monthly, show whether the team is working:

• Forecast error: compare forecasts with actual results over the same horizon each month, and track the size and direction of the gap.
• Budget variance: each material variance comes with an explanation, an action and an owner.
• Decision usefulness: ask the CEO, the leadership team and unit heads which decisions the team's work helped them make.
• Response time: track how long a requested scenario takes against an agreed deadline.

Check how much of the team's time goes into gathering and validating data. A 2024 FP&A Trends report (opens in a new tab) says FP&A teams often spend half their time on data collection and validation, and that 78% of respondents to its 2024 survey found it difficult to run scenarios within a day. If your team is in that position, I'd look at data and systems before adding another analyst.

Before you open the role

FP&A pays off when it changes decisions. Which decision in your business is being made today without the numbers behind it?