TM1 Forum

Hello Guys,

What should one do to gain FP&A business knowledge? How can one learn about concepts like budgeting, forecasting, price and volume variance, expense allocations..etc? Are there any books/courses out there which help in understanding these from an organizational or tm1 perspective?

I see no one has taken a stab at this and there is no short way.

Work in a small business accounting department and make friends with the CPA. You get to touch everything. If you have to prepare the books to be certified audit ready, even better.

Next, take accounting courses if you have had no exposure at all, but if you have a business degree, a graduate level Managerial Accounting course. I was the controller for an agricultural cooperative in my twenties and that was the single most valuable course I may have ever taken.

Hi,

There's several qualifications out there, AAT, CIMA, ACCA, ACA, CPA all cover similar topics (to a degree) but are geared differently, with CIMA (and cpa I think I'm UK and its not common over here) geared towards management reporting, ACA towards financial reporting and ACCA somewhere in between. AAT I think is a good starting ground to give you the basic principles such as what a price or volume variance is, but wouldn't go into much detail about what that then means and analysing it.

I took AAT followed by ACCA and worked in various finance roles before I was lured into the world of TM1.

Try to get in touch with finance department or your auditor/bookkeeper if you don't have a department. They may be willing to share some insights. Or if your not employeed write around to some companies volunteering, I did a bit of volunteer work before I found a role in finance.

I thought this was a good video on general accounting
https://youtu.be/gPBhGkBN30s

There are also videos on Fp&a topics, price and volume variance and the like but haven't found one yet which didn't make me cringe

Hi,

I worked in a finance business partnering service, where the main role was to actually do the budgeting and forecasting.
As Ty said, no course can really beat that.

I also worked in a finance systems section, where we had to look after/adminster the chart of accounts, among other things.
This provided a good insight around the metadata and the information held by the organisation, along with all the issues pertaining to that data.
So data quality, how payroll data linked into finance and vice versa etc etc.

I would just add to Burnstripes list, in the public sector CIPFA is the main accounting body for the UK.

Also would add that as Burnstripe alluded to, there is plenty on the interweb to get your teeth into! Though I don't envy anyone that task!

regards,

Mark

This is of Great help!! Thank you all for all the replies