Remember when accounting and financial planning and analysis were two separate teams? Oh, wait, they still are—that was just us talking to you from the future, courtesy of Edwine Alphonse, the senior controller at Ramp.
While the eight-person accounting team she leads is still distinct from Ramp’s strategic finance team, Alphonse predicts that accounting’s move toward offering more strategic insights will eventually collapse the distinction between the two across the industry.
“At some point, these two functions will converge because they need each other,” Alphonse said. “Maybe someone will have a specialty in accounting, maybe someone will have a specialty in strategic finance, but we will converge and be able to speak the same language at some point.”That convergence won’t happen on its own. To make it happen, accounting leaders will need to build up their teams’ strategic capabilities.
Alphonse spoke with CFO Brew about how she’s been leading this work at Ramp, a topic she recently covered at the Finance and Accounting Technology Expo in New York.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What got you interested in pushing for accounting teams to be seen as more strategic?
I did feel like the perceived value of accounting has been slowly decreasing in the past couple of years, and they’re thinking that accountants are not strategic enough. So I felt like this is something that people should be talking about…Can you train accountants to add the value that an FP&A or strategic finance team is bringing?
How can accounting leaders help their teams become the source for strategic insights that you’re talking about?
You need to educate your team, because right now, accounting teams are busy. If I’m busy, I can’t do more. So part of education is just telling them and showing them how to prioritize…Some tasks might be urgent but not important, so you can delegate them, offshore them, or use different tools so you have more time [for] educating yourself to get strategic skills…Just having that mentality [of] “You know what, my time is better spent somewhere else in work that is more valuable. Can I avoid this [or] get it done some other way, so I can focus on being more strategic?” It’s also educating the top executive, [so] they know to expect [strategic insights] from the accounting team and to empower the accounting team, and to buy the tools [it] needs.
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What sorts of tools can accounting teams use to help with that?
There are different tools that can help with different processes. I’m like the number one customer of Ramp. I use it to make sure that my team has more time so people don’t spend time coding, running after expense reports, categorizing, syncing. We also use FloQast. Right now we’re in the process of implementing Workiva to build financial statements.
How do you go about hiring differently if you’re focused on building up your team’s strategic capabilities?
If you’re building your team and you want that team to be strategic, you need to make sure you have the right accountants there…They need to be able to be like, “Okay, I see a problem. How am I going to solve it and not wait for others to solve it for [me]?” These people are builders, they’re founders, they ask the “So what?” “I booked these numbers. What are the patterns?” This is someone that will spend time and invest in cross-functional partnerships. [They can] talk to the engineering team and tell them the return on investment of hiring one more engineer; go talk to the sales team and tell them there’s no revenue coming from this ad campaign.
It takes longer to hire these people. The last two [or] three hires, it has taken me an average three, four months to get the right candidate.
As accounting teams start offering more strategic insights, how do you keep from stepping on the toes of the FP&A team?
In our team, it’s a partnership. And I feel like we provide [FP&A] with a lot of education, because we know the numbers. And at the same time, they’re educating us as well, like “Here’s what that number will mean for investors.”
So it’s a lot of cross training, and sometimes there’s friction. It’s human nature. But at the end of the day, why are we doing this? We’re doing it so that the company can grow, because we want a bigger return for investors or customers. So it’s a shift of mindset. And as the accounting leader, I try to remind my team that it’s not about egos. It’s about maximizing value. How can we work better and learn from each other? “Help me do my job better and I’ll help you do your job better.”