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From Data Rails, this is FPNA Today.
Welcome to FP &A Today.
I'm your host, Glenn Hopper.
Today, we're excited to welcome Kanna Hopkins.
Kanna is the head of business planning and reporting at Western Power, where she leads the FP &A function for one of Australia's largest electricity network operators.
She brings more than two decades of experience across sectors, including utilities, property development, not -for -profit, retail fuel, and media, both in the UK and Australia.
Kanna is known for her focus on commercial strategy, cross -functional collaboration, and building high -performance finance teams. Kanna, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Glenn. Great to be here.
Yeah, we were saying before the show, we're on complete opposite ends of the clock right now.
So 7 p .m. in central U .S. and 8 a .m., I guess, in Perth now?
out. Yeah, very chilly Perth as well.
It's cold. That's true.
So we're opposite ends of the clock and the calendar.
Yeah. Yeah. It's about 95 degrees Fahrenheit here right now.
So I don't know what that is in Celsius because American.
In the phase? Well, it's three degrees Celsius here.
So figure that one out.
I can figure that one out because I know zero degrees Celsius.
this is well i guess let's dive in here let's uh let's start with with your story walk us through your career journey how you found your way to fpna and eventually to uh your your current role at western power yeah we'll strap yourself in i guess it goes back away but i didn't intend to do this i wasn't meant to be an accountant well that was that was my plan it wasn't my plan my plan was actually to be a graphic designer when i left school but yeah my linear it would wouldn't be linear, my approach to this.
And I guess the job that I say is to blame goes right back to the late nineties.
I was working in London at London Weekend Television, which is a television, or they produce television programs. And I found myself as a temp, but in a role as the personal assistant to the head of rights and royalties.
So that's where they looked after all the contracts for the artists, the writers, the musicians.
And somehow I ended up getting getting involved with the contracts and then understanding the payments to the artists.
And when they onsaw the programs, so they'd often sell to secondary television back then, which was growing, they needed to know how much they needed to pay the artists and whether they're going to get any money out of selling it.
So that is actually the genesis of how I found myself into accounting and FP &A, believe it or not.
Eight -wage yourself into Excel, trying to figure that out.
And from there, it was off to the races.
Well, it wasn't Excel.
It was Lotus 1, 2, 3.
I found myself at a small independent television production company in Covent Garden in London.
And the first thing I was asked was to audit one of the companies that was buying some of their programs. They felt that they weren't getting all the royalties.
So I had a big file locked in front of me with all of the contracts and said, figure it out.
And that's when I kind of realized I needed something to track it all.
And then at that time, they had a little program that was getting a lot of attention.
It was who wants to be a millionaire?
They owned the rights to that, and they were starting to broadcast and sell it across the world.
And there was me, the royalty accountant, in inverted commas, trying to track all the sales in what became 50 countries.
And it wasn't just the program, they licensed everything.
everything, like games, board games, tie -ins, chocolate games, books, you name it, they licensed it.
So it was a great introduction into royalties and not just the IP, it was music as well, but all driven by Lotus 123.
And then obviously because they were growing a lot, they branched out and created another arm, which was their international arm, which I went into, and they employed someone to help me out.
And she was a management accountant.
That was Janet Oakes, and she was probably my first mentor and encouraged me to get qualified.
She said, you're doing the job, but particularly in the UK at the time, unless you're qualified, your salary was very capped.
So I chose CIMA, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.
And I think the reason for that is I looked at all of them, the CA and the ACCA, and the real financial accounting and the accounting standards and auditing didn't really appeal to me.
It was what I was doing and doing with Janet, which was working in the business and understanding where the money was coming from and what it meant and what it meant next and her knowledge of and her prior work she she'd worked at Sega Games and she brought a lot of that knowledge into the business and and when our marketing and sales people were projecting all these crazy sales of pc games and they were getting really excited because it was going so gangbusters she actually was able to I say condition them a little bit and said that's not how pc markets work that's not how the pc game market
works um the first one's always big the second one not so big third one very small sales and it gave me that that insight into what this job could do as far as you've got the knowledge you know the business and you know the industry you can help and advise that's what i like about it so that's what um i suppose encouraged me to get qualified but also chose the moral management accounting business commerce most support.
And that's the FP &A angle as well, as I understand it.
So yeah, that fast forward from there, because this could take forever.
I ended up back in Australia in Darwin, in Northern Territory, running my parents' real estate business.
So I got, I was a registered agent for a bit.
We sold that, rolled that into their superannuation and their pension.
I then worked for the Red Cross in the Northern Territory Division as finance and administration manager.
Worked for also in Darwin a cartage or fuel cartage organization that's big trucks carting petrol around the states.
And then we relocated to Perth.
I spent some time in a property development company as a project accountant sort of financial controller as well.
Moved back into fuel retail.
I was a finance manager there for all the shops and the fuel sales and the forecourt sales.
sales. And then found myself at Western Power, where I've been for the past 12 years.
So that's the ported history.
So, and you've had roles in controllership and on the FP &A side.
And I think those two, obviously, very complementary to each other and probably gives you great insight sort of being on both sides of it.
But now, as I know you've had several roles at Western, but what is What does your position look like today?
How is your FP &A team structured and where now is most of your time and energy focused?
Yeah, the team is growing.
Got about 65 people, 65 positions.
My function is part of the broader finance and regulatory business unit in Western Power.
So, we've got four functions that report through to the CFO. So it's the finance and revenue, which is the more traditional corporate finance, financial accounting, all of our billing and our revenues, our regulatory investment assurance function because we're heavily regulated, and we've got our commercial and supply chain function.
And then there's myself, and we're called business planning and reporting.
But essentially, we've got three areas in my function, which is the partners.
We call it the partners and performance.
so your finance partnering arm, our business planning and analysis arm for all of our forecasting and looks after all the systems and end -to -end cost build estimations through to all the forecasting assumptions.
So I've got a team of estimators who are actually engineers in that team.
And then we have another area that's dedicated to our data and information and visualization.
So we've got reporting people who are non -accountants, but they can talk with our tech guys and know how to get data out of the warehouse which is really important for us obviously so we yeah we've got three three areas and that's broadly how it's how it's um structured at the moment and I say at the moment because we have to keep figuring out what's the best way to do it um the focus is at the moment we're in an interesting situation because we're transmission so we're utility organization we're transmission and distribution so we're the poles and wires and transmission as it is across the world
is evolving a lot because of the changing generation or the type of electricity generation from traditional synchronous coal -fired gas nuclear we don't have nuclear but a lot of a lot of countries do so we're going to wind and solar and that changes things drastically so the focus for us a lot is understanding what that means scenarios forecasting and the growth of what we're required to do that the build of the network and the transmission network is is nothing like we've had since the 60s the 1960s so it's a huge focus at the moment yeah and it's so i mean having the transmission as well it's
such a capital intensive place to be in a highly regulated environment and i i think for a lot of our listeners just just trying to picture what FP &A looks like in a space like that.
I know you've been at Western Power a while, but did a lot before that.
From your point of view, how does FP &A work in the utilities sector different from the other industries you've been a part of?
I don't think it's that much different.
When I came to Western Power, it was actually for a six -week contract.
It was to understand some estimates and why it was changing when they estimated the project and to the actual completion of the project um and that's basic variance analysis you've got a plan you've built up the the cost basis and it didn't turn out that way why so whether it's looking at fuel stocks or whether it's looking at you know constructing a distribution line or or whether it's a you know a funding um application that you're acquitting to a government, it's the same principle.
It's understanding the information, figuring out what's changed and explaining it.
So obviously it does help to understand the nuances of the data coming in and where it's coming in, and I suppose the nature of the business can help you get there quicker, but the basics are the same.
I don't see it too much different, and maybe that's because I have been through different organisations and I've been able to adapt what what I know to those situations.
But I think that's the beauty of the profession.
It's like once you got the basics, it's the same stuff.
You just adapt it to the situation you're in.
Yeah. It's the Rosetta Stone of business.
So from your nonprofit, media, property, utilities, sure, different KPIs by industries, but the role and what you're trying to do for the company doesn't change.
Yeah. And I think your cost drivers are going to be different, or you might be more revenue -driven than cost -driven depending on your industry and your ownership structure.
But no, the basics for me are the same and just have your core foundational things to fall back on when you have to question it.
It's like, what have I done there and how does that relate back?
And then you work it through.
Stock systems are the same anywhere as well.
And ERPs are the same.
They're based on the same principles.
tools. I like your title now, because it's more indicative of what we do, you know, head of business planning and reporting, because I think the same sort of kind of thinking that gets finance and accounting labeled a cost center, that's maybe the old fashioned way to look at it of, oh, we're just reporting historical, but business planning and reporting that in the title suggests strategy in what the real role is.
We're not just running reports so you can know if you got your quarterly bonus or whatever.
It's strategic, the nature of our planning.
Could you maybe walk us through, I know you went through the divisions, but the tasks, the kinds of work you're doing, the projects and skills that you're on in this role?
Because I think in really thinking about those strategic, the value adds that you bring to the company, that's not just, okay we've compiled this quarterly report yeah yeah no sure well the first one i think i mentioned earlier was the scenarios so a couple of years ago we were asked can we look at scenarios of what this might mean when we have a whole lot of new customers coming on new load because they want to decarbonize and they want to connect to a grid that's got renewables on it what would that look like how much of the network would we need to build out what what's the kind of quantum
of cost or a load will that that lead to and what kind of generation would we need to be connecting to satisfy it so we did some scenarios and that was very strategic in nature and they weren't particularly complex or sophisticated it was they were just designed to see this is the potential customer pipeline this is what it could look like ended up in a three pager to the board but so strategic and so useful in driving good conversations at the executive and the board to really start testing what does it mean it wasn't about providing a perfect answer or a perfect a perfected outcome it was just
actually to prompt the discussions and do we have the capacity and the capability to do it or what what do we need to change or think about from a regulatory point of view from stakeholder point of view all those things came up and it's it's a preparational thing the other thing obviously we do the usual budgets the rolling forecasts costs.
We've also got a consolidated 10 -year plan process that we facilitate across the business.
And that is, I suppose it's more tactical in nature.
That's what it's trying to look at, not trying to, it does give an indication of what is our ability to deliver all the things that we need to do, that we want to do, that we think we need to do, that we've actually got the resources to do and that over a 10 -year outlook provides that ability to change direction if we need to.
But the really, really excellent benefit of that process is how we were able to bring a whole lot of different functions in the organization together, which in my experience when I started it five years ago, when I inherited the process, that was so hard. Really, really difficult.
We could talk about that one for a long time.
So we're not the network planners.
We've got engineers who plan the capacity on the network, but we're the business planners.
We bring it all together, including our property division, our IT division, and, of course, all the support functions that go with it.
So we're looking at that.
And we do the strategic workforce plan as well now.
Our team have got all the assumptions for that.
So it's a big thing, but it's a great thing to be part of.
and the discussions that it kicks off.
Yeah, I was talking to another guest recently about finance is the only group in the business where you can get into sales and marketing operations.
You have visibility into the full business.
And before, you and I have both been doing this a while, before we started talking about business partnering, a lot of people would get their feelings hurt when you would come into their group and try to report on what they were doing and feel like you're stepping on their turf and going to shine a bad light or expose something that they didn't want to get exposed.
But I do think that that business partnering is part of this shift in FP &A that we've seen in recent years.
And you alluding, or not alluding to, mentioning directly while the team's working together, I think that's indicative of the view of our role and how we've been in FP &A empowered to do more and to bring those teams together.
I think 15, 20 years ago, it would have been very hard to bring the different groups together to to work on a project like that.
Yeah, and it goes to a lot from my experience where they do perceive you as the accountant and why would you be doing this?
Why are you coming out?
Why are you interested in the capacity of the network?
And, you know, this is extra work for us.
Why are you asking us this?
And I think it's taken that long for them to see the benefit of it when you see it together and the conversations that it's driving.
And it is collaboration.
It's collaboration.
Is it perfect? No. It's an ongoing thing.
Yep. But we're in a much better place than we've been as far as understanding if you need that asset management strategy to come to fruition, how are we going to deliver it?
There's actually a joined up view of it forming, which is gold.
And I think, and the other thing, thinking about scenario planning and a 10 -year plan, since you mentioned earlier how much the industry is changing from fossil fuels to renewable and different storage and distribution, all that around it.
It's got to be an interesting time to be planning for that.
And I guess the shift has been happening for a while.
But if you try to put a date of we're going to reach X amount of energy created by alternative or whatever, whatever those goals are, there are so many unknowns in that forecast. And what you're doing and what everyone does in FPA, FPA, it often involves navigating incomplete data, shifting expectations, just like what you were going through.
I wonder if with this, how you approach that and how you, I mean, I'm just picturing your drivers and assumptions tabs in your spreadsheets, how much those might change as you're going through building out these long range models.
They change a lot. I think what's impacted us the most is it's the inflation that's it's impacted everyone but I think in this industry we've got a different type of structural inflation that's occurring because everyone's doing it at the same time so we've created a shortage of people really that this the electrical engineers are in such huge demand the construction people the steel the the transformers all of the the kit that goes with it everybody everybody wants at once um and in western australia where we're kind of isolated we're the most isolated city i think in the world where we are getting
those resources to come over and develop those markets in the state is is a bit of a challenge as well and we're not interconnected as a grid opportunity mentioned that the swiss the southwest system where we're islanded um so So unlike other and the rest of Australia, they're interconnected with other states and other generation sources and other customers to offload to where not.
So that adds another challenge.
So you're right. The assumptions underneath it, which our team own when we build it out, are really important and they do get questioned quite a bit, particularly on the cost inflation part of it and trying to manage that.
Our unit rates and our estimations have never been under so much scrutiny from the business, which is a good thing, but it's difficult sometimes to keep up with the demand of requests and asks for why has this changed and how are we going to build in the contingency for what may or may not happen.
In all of that too, and being in the isolated part of the world too, so you're leading this team in a very complex organization with a lot of variables and a lot of change and you're doing the business partnering you're getting the company to collaborate across functions what doesn't kill you makes you stronger maybe but i'm wondering uh what have you learned about building a strong fpna function that balances you know the technical skills and the business partnership and having the right team that can because you mentioned with the three functions that you have you know some of them there's maybe
not a lot of crossover and what they're doing how do you balance and structure structure the team and get everybody working together it's an ongoing process call it's i did a we did a change to the the structure bit about 12 months ago to realign the skill sets for a couple of reasons we felt that we just weren't adding enough value as we could with with the skills we had we were getting a bit of crossover and overlap within the teams particularly with the analysis and then i actually started getting little silos within the function as well because because you get the data analysts who thought
that this is the most important thing.
We've got an operational request and this is really important for the field.
They need to understand their productivity and efficiency.
We're going to focus here on this one.
And then you'd get partners saying, no, I need to go out and work with these people.
Whereas if they actually came together, they'd get a much better result.
So I started looking at, well, how do I, how should I set this up?
And I looked at many centers of excellence within the function.
So let's put all of the partnering skillset together.
Let's put all of the analysis and financial planning type skillset together with the estimations and our standard costing and then the data experts together.
Because I thought that was going to help also with their understanding of their career development and their pathway.
And by also bringing in those skills together, well, you'd get, you know, the sum of the grade is greater than this individual parts.
So it's worked to an extent, but we're still figuring it out.
I know that a lot of people have talked about the purple people who are able to do the storytelling, the influencing.
They've got the partnering, but they can get into the data and they can pull that out and they can build all of that.
You really can't. I think that's what we found.
We were developing or wanting to develop the business partners who could do all of that.
But what we found, and they were getting frustrated that that was still getting dragged back into transactional things and figuring out data and cleaning the data, assembling it all the time, building reports and putting it into PowerPoint or doing this or redesigning for a particular head of function who wanted it this way or that way.
So they weren't really partnering and they weren't developing their story.
You know, what is the story here?
Because they kept getting dragged back into the transactional thing.
So that's what I'm working on at the moment is how do I decouple that?
how do I create the roles that are very focused on the month -end, transactional, let's get the data right, versus the ones you can really go out and partner with the business.
And we want to be that, what's next?
How are we going to guide you?
What does it mean? And do the ad hoc analysis around, we've seen some interesting trends.
We want to run that to ground and figure it out.
So I'm not really answering your question, because I haven't come across the great structure yet.
It keeps evolving. And even yesterday, I was talking to one of my area managers about, you know, maybe we need to think about another tweak to how we're structured and how we've got our people sitting in their different teams just to get a greater output and greater value and less frustration for them in the business as well.
Yeah, and I think you're spot on with it.
It's the rare unicorn that has every component that we need to do in FP &A.
And then I think another thing we see a lot is just because you're great at forecasting and modeling or storytelling or any component of it doesn't mean you're going to be great at managing people to do that.
And sort of having to, it's a big ask to having gone through and do all the individual contributor principle type components and then, okay, now lead a team to do it.
And I know you've done a lot of education and program around it.
You served as a CPA WA committee member and you did the GAICD program.
And I'm wondering how those experiences maybe influenced your leadership style and your sort of your approach to strategic planning and thinking about organizing the team and doing this more long term planning and focus as well.
well? The professional bodies, definitely in CPA and CIMA as well, they've got some great competency frameworks.
And I've used that in the past to help look at what's the best way to structure the jobs, the job descriptions, give some role clarity, particularly with the future of finance publications that quite a few of them have done, because they can see it coming.
And And they've seen it coming for quite some time that the demands for our skillset is just growing because we tend to have the people that understand both data, how to extract it out because most accountants have always been there.
And certainly my crew is based on you need to know how to get hold of the information, get it quickly and make sense of it.
Whether that's SQL dragging it straight out of systems. And I've been very dangerous with systems when I've dragged data out and stopped servers working, had IT call me and say, Connor, what are you doing?
it's like one misplaced comma and yeah um so from a leadership point of view yes that they've helped me because they've made me think strategically about what's the best way to do this and there's no right or wrong way but it's helped test it out and get access to other networks and people where you can test out your thought processes as well um so from that point of view hugely helpful powerful.
The CPA committee is a great one if you want to understand how committees work and get into a structured committee that has a president and it's all very well run.
And that helps you if you get in a role that has exposure to a board or a committee.
We have treasury committees and lots of other committees at work and you can see how good ones run and how not so so good ones wrong.
And it's about, when you're on those committees, it's about really learning how to ask the right question and listening.
It's not knowing and not dominating.
And that for me is a really important thing that I've learned with my leadership too, is let go of needing to be the one who knows everything and be the one who asks the really good, insightful questions.
Which is what you expect from your finance folks, right?
That's what we're there for.
Yeah. But I will admit it was hard because I was an individual contributor for quite some time and I don't know if it comes with the role where the expectation is for you to have the answer or you feel you need an answer to be the one with the answer and you feel you've failed if you don't.
So then to switch that into being the one to prompt for the answer and not have it was quite difficult for me.
It was part of, that's been part of my leadership development over the past 10, 15 years, definitely.
advanced visualization reporting and ai capabilities plus game -changing insights giving you instant answers and your story created in seconds find out why more than a thousand finance teams use data rails to uncover their company's real story don't replace excel embrace excel learn more at data rails .com you mentioned and i kind of hung up on this as uh having been been through some of those data nightmares, but when you mentioned pulling data from disparate systems and all that, I'm wondering what tools or technologies are you using to support FP &A today?
And is there something you're using that's kind of helped improve your planning or reporting or business insights or getting more real -time information?
What's your tech stack look like?
Well, we've got a lot of legacy enterprise systems at Western Power.
So our tech stack is a bit varied, but it comes down to our ERP, which is Ellipse, which is the typical asset management system.
We have, for our planners, we've got Primavera 6, our investment tools, ProSite, and we've got everything going into a data warehouse, most importantly.
So that is our major, I'll call it a tool as well.
And then we extract using Excel.
But our main visualization tool is Qlik Sense.
So that's how we map it all together.
We do have planning analytics for our planning tool.
Everything's on -prem.
So unfortunately, we don't have access to the smarts that are in the cloud and the predictors yet.
But that is essentially our tech stack.
And it all ties together in the warehouse.
So I can't stress that is the most important thing for me is that central source where it all flows through to.
And I would imagine with that, well, I can't imagine the amount of data.
I worked in a small telecom company for a number of years, and I was blown away by the amount of data that we had.
But to be a full utility covering that, I would imagine that that data warehouse is quite large.
I'm wondering, do you have in the data warehouse, do you feel like there's a good sort of data dictionary and lexicon?
And are you using like, is it set up like a self -serve data mart kind of thing?
Do people know to poll consistently for the same source of truth and all the data problems that we run into all the time?
Yes, I will attempt to explain because I know I mix up my technical terms a bit here.
But we've got the warehouse, and we also have access to Azure.
So we don't directly.
That's for the big kids in our tech area and for all of our asset management and data.
What we've done is built very strong relationships with our data architects who sit in our tech functions and we've got people in our function who understand it and the databases.
We've built our own little mini warehouse within the warehouse for our financial data so that we can access it when we need to.
and we've got the ETL, the extract transform loads and all the rules around that and our tech people trust us because we've built the right kind of business rules and they're all documented so they know what it is and what it means and other people can understand it.
There is a glossary and we've got all the data governance and everything that's run by our tech functions, which we work with them on as well.
So we've got experts who will have an opinion Union and they feed it back.
But it is structured and there is some science and methodology behind it.
Having said that, I know it's not perfect and it has grown so much over the years that things fall over and break.
And we only had a month where something didn't build properly and now one of our main tools didn't work.
One of my team that helped fix it.
But yeah, we do have that.
Do we still have issues with incomplete data, misinterpretations?
Yes, we do. Yeah, I've yet to meet a company that, if they were being honest, wouldn't say the exact same thing.
I mean, it doesn't matter how big the team is or how mature the company is or how long they've been working on it.
It's just, I think it's the amount of data and how much change there's been and the different types of data from structured, unstructured coming in in so many ways.
It's just, it's such a moving target.
I don't, I mean, it keeps a lot of people employed, I guess.
But I've never known anyone to say, yep, we've got everything locked down.
Our data is perfectly set up and no questions, no issue.
Yeah, it's constantly changing.
And like you said, there's new stuff coming in all the time.
What I would say and something I've really learned in this role, and it could be the the size of the organisation, is the importance we play in helping that data get better.
So by visualising it, bringing it out, by trying to interpret it, that's the first start of actually getting to the cause of why you might have incomplete data or issues at the start because that data is only as good as the processes in the business that are supporting it.
So if the processes aren't working quite well or it's broken, then you're going to get incomplete information.
So one of the really important roles of I believe FP &A is to actually be the ones who flag it but also help their partners in the business understand how to fix it.
Yeah, I love that. I have to ask because I ask all my guests just because it's really interesting to see the way different industries and different companies and different size companies are all dealing with this.
But, of course, everybody's talking about AI and automation and finance.
And as you were walking through the legacy systems that you're using, it sounds like you guys have a great data program.
But I'm wondering what you guys are doing right now, if anything, on AI and automation and what sort of the zeitgeist around it is.
Are there any AI tools that you're using or is there like a digital transformation wing that's looking at doing stuff with AI?
Yeah, it's exciting actually that we do.
We've just started a pilot of co -pilot within the organisation.
I'm on the AI Governance Council and we've just had our second meeting.
So it's all starting to ramp up.
And I think you could say we're a bit slower than others, but it's critical infrastructure and we have to ensure that everything's absolutely locked down and safe.
from, I totally understand our cyber guys of why they've been very careful with this.
So I'm talking the co -pilot type AI.
To be fair, we've had machine learning for quite some time, the smart kids, as I call them, in our data centers and the data analytics.
We've had that for a while for all of our demand forecasting where they've tried to predict.
Yeah, because you've got so much good data there and I'm sure that those models are very with the amount of data that you had as well.
Very good and the asset management data as well and the condition of the assets.
They've had that for quite some time where I've been very jealous and started to be much more vocal is we've got a great use case as well.
They forget about us because they're distracted by all the other excellent shiny stuff that we can do with that data and our metering data as well.
That's huge as well and they forget about we can do some predictive forecasting and we've got a nice little contained warehouse a house now about 10 years of information, it's ripe.
I'm finally getting some traction where there's an agreement that this is a safe place where we can put some algorithms and machine learning on it.
It's just a matter of now of what sort, what time to get the predictors going.
Do you have members on your team who could do that now or you'd have to get the resources that could build machine learning algorithms now?
We've got people in the team who would be be absolutely chomping at the bit to have a go and learn it.
We would have to bring in some skill sets to do it.
And I have actually got a new person starting who I hope will be bringing some of that to us as well and continuing to build on the relationships with our IT function to ensure that they see us as the next cab off the rank, if you will, of bringing it in.
I'm learning how to to use Copilot and so from a point of view of how that can help us in the future I can see it doing a lot as far as compiling the basic month end reports and in the powerpoints and cutting and pasting things out where I send emails to executive just giving them summarizing of the numbers I can get that to update it for me now automatically which is it's a little thing but when you're manually cutting and pasting numbers sounds crazy but I think a lot of us are still doing it but it does save that time um and i think it'll save a lot of time building together reports the board
reports i'm looking forward to to learning how to prompt it better at the moment it's given me really good summaries of my my week in comedy roast style but i need to get a bit which is good at the end of the week when you feel it's been a bit much and it just replays it back to you it's yeah okay it wasn't that bad okay that's pretty funny i like that use case i'm going to have to try that out now too.
Well, you're, I mean, that's great to hear that you guys are focused on that transformation and have committees looking at it and even understanding the risks, but still also knowing it's not going anywhere.
You dig, you can bury your head in the sand, but that's, uh, you know, probably the long -term in the bad place.
So it's cool to, it's cool to hear that you guys are doing that.
And I'm wondering just the transition and the changes that you've seen over your career and sort of reading the writing on the wall.
and I ask so many people this question too because it is interesting to get the different viewpoints and feedback on it.
But I mean, what do you see if we end up automating more of the kind of the lower level data entry type tasks and even some basic model building and I'm seeing new tools every day that it's basically like chat GPT integrated into Excel, kind of what I know Microsoft is ultimately trying to do with Copilot, they're not there yet.
But what do you see how it changing and kind of where opportunities are for FP &A folks in that kind of environment?
I see there's a lot for that.
At the moment, with what I've seen with our version of Copilot, I'm not worried.
I asked it to do some stuff, and it came back with some very weird -looking things.
I've been telling my teams for a while now, and particularly the partners, it's like you really need to move away from thinking that the report is your purpose, just producing the report and sending it out.
um this is coming and and it was really a few years ago i was going to be a bit cynical and say you know all this stuff about ai isn't that what rpa was five years ago when everyone was getting all excited about it same same but different um and we were told it's going to transform all your transactional finance and you're not going to have to do it and we've got a little bit of rpa we've done a little bit in some journals i think it's helped a lot more in our transactional finance team our colleagues over there but really it was a bit it disappointing because when all the experts came in, they
said, actually, you're not big enough.
You haven't got enough use cases and your information is not standard enough.
Not worth it. So disappointing.
And I'm really hoping that some of these things with AI is not going to be the same where we get sold all this excitement and here's your bright, shiny new thing.
And when it actually comes down to it, we're not going to have as much we can do with it as we thought.
Whether it's because we haven't got enough standardized data or it's not ready enough or it's not in the right environment.
I'm not sure what it will be, but I'm a little bit worried that that's what it's going to end up as.
So yeah, I hope not.
Free me wrong, Glenn.
So I think as someone who messes with this stuff every day, I mean, I think and having gone through several RPA projects, which were just a nightmare, super cool when they were done and they still didn't catch everything and I don't think AI will either.
But the difference that I'm seeing and, you know, UiPath is putting and the other big RPA companies out there are putting a lot of money into doing, you know, RPA version two, which I think with generative AI, what you get is contextually aware RPA, where if you think about how you had to manually go through and identify every grid on an invoice or whatever, you know, whatever you were automating, you had, it was very, very specific.
Whereas with generative AI, Right.
So right as we speak, I had this spreadsheet with a bunch of upcoming speaking and event dates coming up and I hadn't put them in my calendar.
So in the background right now for me, operator from OpenAI, and it's been taking forever, but what do I care?
I'm not doing it. It's going through the spreadsheet and adding them to my Google calendar.
And to me, that's like personal RPA, but I didn't have to go through and do all the training.
I just logged in to my Gmail through the operator and it's going through.
I can check now and see if it's done.
But there are probably 20 different events on that.
I should check it now.
But to me, when I do that, that's a toy use case.
But I think about reconciliations or any sort of process.
When the technology gets good enough, if it does and it gets into the hands of individuals, if everybody had their own RPA that worked and that didn't take as long to set up and wasn't as fussy maybe as RPA was, that's sort of the promise that I'm leaning in on.
But you're right. I mean, we were promised a lot with RPA and it didn't quite get there because it was so difficult to set up, I think.
I think it's a setup.
I do feel fast forward five years from now.
um what i would like to see is a very different i'd see my function as being very different again in the three areas i think there'll be a different balance of skill sets insofar i think there'll be some gun finance partners who go out to the business but there'll be a group of people who actually spend more time understanding how to prompt the large language models or the lot the the little language models as you want to call them and they will be their skills would be learning how to do that as an expertise rather than the journals and the transactional accounting there will be a different a different
job description if you will sitting in there doing that and and that's kind of what we've we thought would happen with the rpa people that would have people who were just sitting there managing the the bots tweaking the bots and when the structure of the business changes and all that responsibility code changes they're going in to to change the code to make sure it knows what it's doing.
I think that's what it's going to be in the future, is people who are experts at prompting degenerative models.
Yeah, and okay, now is a great time for your public service announcement.
Thinking about that and seeing the changes that you've made and kind of reading the writing on the wall, and maybe you have some junior members on your team that this would apply to, but if someone were just starting out in FP &A today and thinking about where we're going to be, If we hit this promised land where we're going to be with automation and so much of that lower level work being done, what skills or habits do you think that someone in their early career, because even if it doesn't happen in five years, even if it doesn't happen in 10 years, you know, if you're just starting out looking
20 years down the road, what does an FP &A job look like then?
So if you're advising someone, a junior person on your team or one of our listeners, what do you tell them to focus on and get really good at?
I know you just said the prompting, but outside of that, the true finance function that's going to survive when all the cool model building and all that stuff that we did goes away.
I think we're going to have a real shortage of people who actually know the basics of accounting and double entry and how it works through systems. So I say learn the basics, know that really, really well, and understand how the data flows through the systems. If you know that and you conquer that, you'll be the one who is fixing all the bots and all the models that have gone wrong and you will be in great demand.
That's my prediction, Glenn, is that people are going to get so used to just asking for things and just it appearing that we're going to lose people who have had to think through how did it get there in the first place.
It's a concern of mine actually, but I really, truly believe we're losing I'm starting to see it come through now that people don't understand how the data got there in the first place.
And if you don't understand that, I'm worried you don't know whether it's going to be right or wrong.
That's such an interesting way to look at it too, because I think if you picture classical accountant paper ledger going through doing your debits and credits as you work through and make the entry, who cares where the data goes?
But that's not the world we live in, obviously.
And that's the oldest man or the most old man thing I think I've said in a a year.
But it's, I mean, it's not, oh, that's someone else's problem.
I just make the entries.
Well, I think the entries are going to be automated, but getting, understanding that data universe and what can happen with it and where to go for it.
I think you're spot on there that that is going to be very important.
And I keep telling people, learn data science.
You don't have to be a machine learning engineer because you're going to be able to do that, have generative AI write the code for you.
But if you understand sort of the, you know, proper regression that you you can do with machine learning or clustering or classification and sort of understand how the models work and understand some basic data science principles, you're going to know how to interact with the models.
And if you understand that data flow and how to interact and what to ask for, and you have the domain expertise of accounting, then that's what's valuable.
Yeah, if I was starting out now, that's what I'd be learning as well.
I sort of probably too late to really get into the Python and proper SQL.
I know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to, you know, it's a bit like macros in Excel.
I could read enough to know where the mistake was, but don't ask me to write it from scratch. I agree.
I think that's something that you need to have that in your toolkit.
All right, we're to everybody's favorite part of the show where we have our final two boilerplate questions for everyone.
And the first one, I don't know how this showed up, but we ask everybody.
So I'm going to throw it out there.
I know how the second one showed up and it is my favorite, but the first one.
And I think we spent so much time talking about all the professional stuff and what we're doing that we do try to humanize it at the end.
So what is something that not many people know about you?
Probably a few things.
Probably the reason why I was in London all those years ago is that I was determined to be a sound engineer.
So my first career was actually as a sound engineer, year i worked in recording studios in the sort of between 93 and 97 so yeah i i was deep in the the sound studios of london oh very cool that had to be a cool scene too yeah yeah it was actually yeah very long hours very bad pay which is what spun me out of it um and yeah it was um very impacted by technology you know we're talking about technology now for finance professionals music music and that that was hit very quickly and studios went out of business because, well, as you know, I've got my phone here somewhere.
Everything that was in those studios sits in here now.
It's crazy. Yep. All right.
Now, everybody's favorite question.
What is your favorite Excel function and why?
Not sure if it's a function, but it's the first thing I always put in my shortcuts toolbar.
Select visible cells.
Yes. Okay. I get that.
That when you're sorting and filtering and you need to move it around.
Yep, I totally get that.
Yeah, it's probably tells my vintage and there's probably much better ways of doing it now.
But I've made a lot of friends telling them about that button because of when you're filtering and cleaning your data.
And it used to, you know, overwrite everything of your hidden cells.
But that one stops overwriting everything.
So, yeah, that was my favorite.
So, well, Connor, this has been a lot of fun.
I really appreciate you taking time.
I know you're not in the office today because you stayed home a little bit later to do the podcast. And I appreciate you coordinating the time on the opposite end of the world from us.
But really, really enjoyed your insights.
And thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you.
