Hopefully, we’ve gotten through the worst of the winter blues. The sun is peeking out here and there to warm up some days, and baseball’s preseason has already started. But, as much as we’d like to ditch it all for a cold one and an afternoon doubleheader, there’s still work to be done.
To help you navigate through the challenges of finance and accounting work—and the waning days of winter—we’ve gathered LinkedIn cheat sheets on how FP&A can interact with the rest of the C-suite, understanding retained earnings, and pairing essential technical and soft skills.
Our usual disclaimer to the wise: You should always look for additional resources and expertise when doing complicated finance work because it can be very difficult to accurately sum up sophisticated concepts.
With that said, take a look at these useful finance cheat sheets CFO Brew found on LinkedIn this month.
- Joy Mnanugo’s “Strategic conversations in FP&A: Navigating the human element” is a 23-page slide deck based on a presentation that Mnanugo made at the Finance Alliance FP&A Summit in January. In it, Mnanugo, CFO at ServiceRocket, explores the FP&A function and how it interacts with the C-suite. She also lays out practical advice for how FP&A professionals can improve their relationships with high-level executives. Finally, she dives deeper into what the future holds for FP&A within business leadership.
For example, she looks at how FP&A empowers “data-driven decision making” for the C-suite by converting metrics into financial insights, and how that aligns forecasting with strategic initiatives. She also includes a case study on how Kraft Heinz used FP&A and zero-based budgeting in a five-year strategic transformation effort. - Brian Feroldi’s “Retained earnings explained simply.” Feroldi, a finance speaker and author, says that Warren Buffet “always looks at retained earnings,” and goes on to define retained earnings and how to uncover them in financial statements. He also includes what he calls “Buffett’s ‘rules of thumb’” when it comes to retained earnings.
He lays out the formula for calculating retained earnings (no spoilers here, you gotta click through), how retained earnings can be indicative of a company’s financial health, and the impact on shareholder equity. Feroldi’s post has both text explanations of the concepts as well as a one-page chart that graphically lays out the concepts. - Wassia Kamon’s “Power pairs: Essential technical and soft skills in finance and accounting.” Kamon, VP of finance and controller for the Low Income Investment Fund, regularly posts useful skill development tips for finance and accounting professionals. In this cheat sheet, she demonstrates how important technical and soft skills combine to “elevate some of the work we do now.
For example, she shows how the technical skill of financial reporting pairs with communication skills to “[ensure] data is communicated clearly to stakeholders.” Kamon breaks out the different skills necessary to both corporate accounting and corporate finance/FP&A.