The last frontier: Getting FP&A from Back Office to Brilliant - Daniel Paik

FP&A Today

Former CFO Daniel Paik, turned founder and CEO of CuroWork is at war on back office functions. He vows to “transform back-office departments from cost centers to profit centers” with FP&A in their sights. He says: “I call the back office the last frontier. We are the only ones not measuring ourselves. Therefore we get crap given to us every single day."

Here are some of the ways that Daniel Paik, a former CFO, fixed the “back office” mentality in finance teams.

• Salespeople at one company said that the hardest part of their job is the 4 hours of entering Excel sheets related to forecasts. After looking at the situation, Paik decided to hire a financial analyst (at $80,000) to take away the pain for salespeople previously diverted away from the selling - bringing in $4m in extra revenue
• Paik discovered and stopped a recurring report that hasn’t been read by the client in three years - giving back up to 5 hours a week to finance for strategic tasks
• By analyzing how a finance professional was performing next to her job description Paik found “she was 140% utilized just on her recurring work” (compared to ad hoc work or project work). “By reallocating a lot of our time to project work we can become a value center or a profit center.”

In this episode:

• ERP SOS! How an 8 month ERP implementation turned into two years
• Moving from individual finance contributor to manager: tips and tricks
• What Peter Drucker actually said about measurement (and why it matters)
• The unmeasured country of Back Office functions
• Managing finance buckets into recurring work, ad hoc work and projects
• How to balance a million finance projects
• The right metrics to measure the finance team
• Average worker only productive up to 4 hours a day and how to get the most of that time
• What is a business for?”
• The real power of a project
• The power of AI in the back office

Connect with Daniel Paik on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielpaik/

CuroWork: https://www.curowork.com/