A few customers have independently asked me recently how large their Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) teams should be as they try to maximize org chart efficiency through the current period of market volatility.
Our data science team took a look at the latest benchmarks. How big should your Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) team be? Let’s explore the data to find out.
What is FP&A?
FP&A, or Financial Planning and Analysis, is the team that handles budgets, forecasts, and figures out if the company is hitting its targets—in other words, the financial brain center of a company. They’re the number-crunchers who turn financial data into useful insights so leaders can make smarter decisions, asking questions like "how are we doing?" and "what should we do next?" The FP&A team typically reports to the CFO, but in some larger or more complex companies, there might be a dedicated FP&A executive director or VP of Financial Planning & Analysis.
Methodology
In order to uncover benchmarks for FP&A team size, our data science team took a look at org charts from over 1,400 customers in Pave’s dataset with at least 50 employees and at least 1 FP&A employee.
The FP&A job family includes job titles like:
- Financial Analyst
- Financial Planning
- FP&A Manager
We organized the results, broken down by company stage, according to the ratio of “Employees per FP&A team member(s)”.
Takeaways
So, how many FP&A professionals should you have within your organization?
Ratio of Employees to FP&A Team Member
- Typical growth stage ratio = ~130 employees per FP&A team member
Once companies get into the ~200-2,000 employee bucket, the median “Employees-to-FP&A” ratio mostly levels out at around ~130.
- Larger companies = higher ratios
As companies get larger, the leverage per FP&A team member generally increases. For instance, the median ratio at companies with 3,001+ employees is 161.
- Right-skewed distributions
Across most company stages, the distributions are right skewed. This suggests that there are a decent number of firms that disproportionately stretch the leverage of each FP&A team member. For instance, the 75th percentile at companies with 3,001+ employees is 332 Employees-to-FP&A. So if your company is in the 300-400 range for this ratio, maybe your setup is not spread as thin as it initially seems.
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Practical Suggestions for Compensation & HR Leaders
The inspiration for this post originally came from a customer looking for insight around "support" functions like Information Technology and HR Business Partners—functions where the number of people in the role would presumably be somewhat dependent on the number of people at the company.
What is your company’s Employees-to-FP&A ratio and what percentile does that place your company’s FP&A team size? Use this to inform your ongoing org chart planning.
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