The Financial Organization Responsibility Matrix ("FORM") is a framework for breaking down the roles, responsibilities, and skills of a finance and accounting department by function rather than by job title.
📝Traditional accounting titles were designed before the internet and don't communicate very well where any person hired into a finance and accounting department will land. A financial organization needs four skill sets:
- Operations skills
- Engineering skills
- Strategic and analytical insight
- Communication and storytelling skills
Typically, people with engineering skills set up systems for those with operational skills to run, producing reports for those with increasing levels of strategic and analytical insight. Add communication and storytelling skills, and a track record of success is the likely result.
📝Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A)
- Building the 📝Integrated Financial Model (IFM)
- Key metrics identification and analysis
- 📝Unit Economics analysis
- Setting up a 📝Reporting Tool to easily deliver weekly pipeline metrics such as 📝Hubspot Weekly, monthly financial reports, and quarterly board reports
- Planning and budgeting
- Assisting project teams and departments with operational metrics and financial analysis
- Producing weekly metrics, monthly financial reports, and quarterly board reports from the reporting tool
- Marketing analytics
- Scenario analysis
- Drilling deeper into results to understand deeper drivers
Accounting
- 📝Bookkeeping
- Reconciling accounts
- Maintaining accounts payable
- Collecting W-9s with the 📝1099-inator
Controller
- Paying bills (overseeing Bill.com)
- Invoicing customers
- Supporting an audit by CPAs or regulatory bodies
- Filing taxes: payroll, income, state, local, and federal
- Sending out 1099s with the 1099-inator
Payroll
- Registering to do business in all jurisdictions
- Running payroll
- Dealing with employees' questions about their paychecks
Financial Engineer
The Financial Engineer designs, sets up, and maintains the information systems and data connections that run all the processes affecting information on the 📝General Ledger.
- Instrumenting a business and setting up the 📝DataLinks
- Designing processes and systems to change trends in the business
- Implementing and maintaining financial apps and DataLinks
Beyond these functions, the matrix also lists:
- Influence both in the company and in the industry
- A network of trusted team members and service providers
- A record of integrity