u/LawAbidingPanda

Hi everyone I used to be in FP&A myself but I wanted to get an understanding of below:

1. Roles a CFO/Director of Finance plays in their org
   1. Lets assume this is a CFO of a large 700+ employee org 200m+ in revenue
2. Things they generally look for when buying a EPM solution this could be
   1. Pain points they currently face they're looking to solve
   2. Apprehension and fears about buying software
   3. What are things they look at and focus on

I'll just post my understanding of the role and you all can let me know if I'm on the right track please and if I'm missing anything critical. I did parse it through chatGPT but I was wondering if you saw any nuance to this in your roles.

CFO roles and duties

• Reports to CEO
• Oversee entire FP&A and Accounting but not limited to payroll, Tax, maybe even pricing given the scope
• Set the overall strategy of the department and guide senior leaders
• Managing enterprise risk, SOX controls, relationships with internal/external auditors
• Communicate financial results to the CEO and the board as well as external stakeholders (investor calls if public company)
• Admin duties such as approving departmental level changes , HC provisioning promotions etc
• Direct mentorship of direct reports (VP, directors depending on how many layers of management)
• Responsible for the budget completing on time
• Responsible for the forecast being as accurate and timely as it can be
• Communication between C-suite level execs to support expansion initiatives wingman to the CEO
• Involved in high level budget number and sets budget number for sales (if top down) to be communicated to director level for the budget - not involved in granular budget

Director

• Reports to VP or CFO
• Executes the strategy set by the CFO through their direct reports who are usually managers of individual contributors (IC)
• The most responsible for getting budgets done on time they administer the budget cycle to make sure managers enforce IC's entering in budgets in a timely manner
• Mentor the finance managers or controllers (depending on org structure)
• Are the ones most involved with implementations of new software (Anaplan, Vena, Prophix) on the customer side
• Create the policies and procedures that the rest of the finance department are expected to adhere to
• Ensure the financial analysis is consolidated and presented to the CFO
• Last line of escalation before the CFO for financial information
• Maintain relationships with other heads of departments, Sales, HR, Product etc

There are VP's of course but I mean it makes sense for the VP's to be in buckets like a VP of FP&A for NA East vs a VP for EMEA but that's more of a size thing I think?

Hi everyone

Was recently laid off at my last company of four years. Two in implementations and two in product and it feels like it's not enough experience for the roles in the market right now. Was an APM level but did some pretty cool things like building a feature that brought over 450k ARR (and counting) and led the sunsetting of a feature that had 11k MAU's on it. My background is originally in FP&A (6 years exp) and I'm a CPA so I'm thinking of targeting companies in that space but they aren't always hiring.

It's been a week since the layoff and I've had a couple interviews but they haven't progressed to the next stage and I don't know if it's because how I answered the questions or the experience.

Is the 2 years of experience off putting?

• Would you disqualify it

Was going to try and create an app in my off time but would need to spend money to hire a dev or figure out some vibe coding to make it happen.

• How useful would this be?

Thanks everyone would appreciate anyone's output. If this keeps on going then I'm going to have to go back into implementations which I'm not opposed to. I just really enjoyed my time building products and would love to do this for a career.

Appreciate you all.