Modern Finance
How To Develop a Finance Business Partnering Model
Are you looking to develop a finance business partnering model and become a more effective finance business partner? Here are some tips to get you started.
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Finance business partnering is when finance teams work directly with other areas or divisions of the business to drive strategic value. Businesses generate masses of data and insights, all of which may help the organization’s decision-makers forge a more profitable path forward. But generating the data and information is one thing—getting it into the hands of the right people is another.
That’s where finance business partnering comes in. Because Finance has a birds-eye view of much of their company’s inner workings through the budget process and ongoing reporting, they’re uniquely positioned to deliver value to the rest of the business through strategic partnerships.
Data from the 2024 FP&A Trends Survey shows that business partnering is becoming ubiquitous–demand for business partnering skills increased by 9% among finance leaders between 2023 and 2024.
Business partnering brings value to finance teams and FP&A professionals, too. Forming reciprocal relationships with other teams across the organization leads to stronger analysis, as you can better understand the context behind the numbers.
Read on to learn more about finance business partnering and how to facilitate it in each area of your organization—from Operations and HR to Sales and IT.
Finance business partnering refers to the finance team’s ability to work with other teams or divisions within a company to enhance collaboration and push the larger organization forward.
But what does that actually entail on a day-to-day basis? It means aligning strategy across the entire organization by producing financial reports, forecasts, analyses, and more. The goal is to get everyone moving in the same direction toward a common goal or destination. Typically, that’s a higher level of profitability.
When finance managers deliberately connect with other departments, they can help in various ways. These can include helping plan budgets, setting key performance indicators for a specific department or division, analyzing and modeling data, and doing scenario planning.
In a way, it’s like each department has its own embedded FP&A team to help them become more efficient and increase performance. More and more companies are realizing the importance of finance business partnering, too. A recent survey from PwC found that nearly half of CFOs are prioritizing finance business partnerships in the coming years.
Finance business partnerships, on their face, sound relatively easy to implement and benefit from. After all, it seems that forming partnerships within an organization is more or less a matter of connecting the right people. But there are challenges to consider and prepare for. Those could include:
Trust and credibility rifts
Interdepartmental jargon and linguistic moats
Balancing demands with day-to-day KPIs
First and foremost, organizations will need to contend with the fact that there can be trust and credibility issues from the onset—not that leaders of different divisions don’t necessarily trust each other, but they simply may not be used to working together, and it may take some time to build rapport.
There can also be some team culture differences to get over. For instance, if a member of the finance team starts working with Marketing, and the two teams use different jargon and terminology, that can take a bit of time to work out.
The ability to effectively communicate financial information to non-finance-focused teams, or construct a narrative around data, is a skill not to be overlooked. A lot of information may sound entirely foreign to non-finance stakeholders, requiring finance professionals to adapt how they present information to have maximum impact.
Finance teams may benefit from a deeper operational understanding of other departments’ day-to-day tasks and objectives. However, making time to foster that understanding can be difficult when balancing daily tasks and demands. What’s more, effective business partnering also requires certain skills–especially soft skills such as proactive communication and building trust–that may not be inherent to finance teams. These skills can, however, be learned.
Finance teams are generally skilled in technical aspects. They can crunch numbers, balance the accounts, generate reports, analyze data, and more. But interpersonal skills are important, too.
In fact, when it comes to finance business partnering, interpersonal skills may be more important than technical skills. All of the data and financial insight in the world is useless if it can’t be effectively communicated to the rest of the organization and those who are going to put it to use.
Here are some of the most important interpersonal skills that may come into play with finance business partnering:
Empathy: A desire and ability to interact with others is key, as is the ability to empathize with others who may not have a finance background or agree with the finance team’s suggestions.
Business acumen: It is critical to understand what other areas of the business are trying to accomplish and how those goals mesh with the finance team’s goals.
Challenging the status quo: Leaders must be comfortable with challenging traditional processes and thinking within other departments to reach loftier strategic goals.
Project management: Effective business partnering requires organizing, setting milestones, and following through on plans or ideas.
Be an influencer: The ability to share information in a way that will influence decisions. Or more to the point, know what’s going to resonate with your audience and get them excited, based on what you know matters to them.
Think of business partnering as being a change agent to other departments. That requires stepping out of your comfort zone to introduce new ideas, explain their importance, and follow through with plans to implement them.
Of course, that may be tricky, depending on each particular area of the business you’re trying to partner with, and may require different approaches.
How can finance leaders create the most effective business partnerships in each area of their business?
Depending on who you’re partnering with, you’ll need a slightly different approach and strategy. We asked real leaders from numerous business teams for their advice on creating effective business partnerships with their functional areas. Here’s what they had to say.
Operations is as broad a department as it gets, as it typically touches every area within a business. A COO at one company may have a drastically different day-to-day agenda than a COO at a different company.
With that in mind, Operations is one of the most critical areas for Finance to forge a partnership with. Vena’s State of Strategic Finance 2025 report found that Operations was the department with which finance teams collaborate the most, cited by 63% of respondents.
“I think it’s really important that finance people do not just look at a bunch of numbers and say, ‘here, go make this change,’” says Sandra Clarke, Former Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Blue Shield of California, in a recent episode of The CFO Show podcast hosted by Melissa Howatson, Vena’s CFO.
To make this partnership a success, Sandra says, “both sides need to know where they’re, experts and where they’re not. Both need to be passionate first and foremost about what’s best for the business.”
Finance should look to Operations to understand what’s happening on the ground—what it actually takes to drive the revenue. Meanwhile, Operations should look to Finance to learn how their efforts ladder up to the business’s overall financial performance.
Finance and legal teams may take different approaches, but ultimately, they’re working towards the same goals: managing risk and being good stewards of the business.
Megha Parekh, Executive Vice President and CLO of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars, on the CFO Show podcast, says that when it comes to building effective partnerships between the two teams, it’s all about communication.
“The most productive relationships and the healthiest relationships are when everybody has clear communication,” Megha says. The teams “need to work in tandem,” she says, “and they can really only work in tandem when you have people who are willing to put their egos aside, play as a part of a team, and think about what information do we need to put together so that our clients can make the best business decisions possible.”
By creating effective collaboration between Finance and Legal, businesses can drive better business outcomes by considering more than just cost mitigation or risk tolerance alone.
There are some obvious areas where the finance team can help inform human resources teams about how to direct their strategies—there’s headcount and team management, hiring budgets, and more to consider.
But sometimes, tension can arise between the two, with Finance perceived as the spending police when it comes to human capital, and HR coming to employees’ defence.
“Where I have seen tension is where there has been a lack of understanding of the breadth, depth, and complexity of each other’s role,” Tracy Edkins, CHRO, Board Member and Advisor says.
That may stem from inexperience, or “maybe a lack of trust, or a lack of assumption of good intent,” she adds. Some of that assumption may stem from HR departments often not “being very data-driven,” and traditionally, it could have been difficult to get access to the data or insight to determine whether HR’s investments were paying off.
Bringing the data to HR, helping them measure their investments, and driving better people decisions can help the two teams work together more efficiently. “If you can help build the trust and make sure people understand the demands on each side, it can reduce the tension,” Tracy says.
When it comes to making technology investments to drive value for the business, a collaborative relationship between IT and Finance makes all the difference.
Working together, finance and IT teams can help each other solve myriad problems. That could include implementing more efficient or cost-effective technology and tools, determining ROI for specific technology upgrades or investments, and more.
Rather than being prescriptive about which technologies to adopt, IT and Finance benefit from engaging in those conversations early in service of balancing both innovation and conscious spending.
It’s a collaborative relationship. There’s give and take. And it’s built on trust and communication,” says Johan Dowdy, Global Head of IT and IT Security at Asana.
The finance team may already have a close relationship with the sales and revenue team, perhaps more so than any other department within an organization. That means fostering a good business partnership between the two is extra important.
Puneet Arora, President at Yellow.ai, says that leaders of the finance and sales teams need to establish strong relationships to pursue larger goals. For finance professionals, that means taking advantage of the opportunity to learn at the ground level and not being afraid to get your hands dirty.
“Get on calls, join the sales team on calls. Try and understand from customers what problems they’re facing, and how to solve them,” Puneet says. “The usual thought is that sales teams want to maximize their paychecks, but I see true leaders are more involved and reliant on the long-term strategy of the company. For that, I’d say getting in on deals, seeing where the roadblocks are, I think, is one of the most critical things.”
Customer success can seem like a cost center from a finance team’s perspective, but in reality, they’re also important wells of information and insight that help businesses pivot or innovate.
April Oman, the Chief Customer Officer at Resilinc, says on The CFO Show that a good business partnership between finance and customer success teams can help create allies within the broader organization.
“What I have found is that if you have a really strong partnership with finance, it’ll give you an advocate in the boardroom and in business conversations, and also helps when there are times around the budget and steady revenue goals,” April says. “My advice is when you want to partner with the CFO, it’s really to align on the targets.” she added.
By aligning more closely with your customer success team, you can more effectively set targets around important metrics like customer churn, retention, expansion and applicable quotas and be a united front when it comes to business-wide decisions.
Marketing’s mandate is to increase brand awareness for the company–which is notoriously hard to measure. That’s where Finance can provide an essential partnership.
Finance teams can, for example, measure the effectiveness of given marketing campaigns, strategize more effective cost allocations based on the data those campaigns generate, and perhaps even use data from past projects to create seasonal projections or strategies.
One way to facilitate partnership between the two departments is by designating specific team members to work with one another. That’s the advice proffered by Ruth Zive, CMO at LivePerson.
“Use a designated finance business partner, ideally somebody who has a baseline understanding of marketing,” she says. “I have marketing ops resources on my team, and somebody in that group is partnering in lock-step with that finance partner, and that bubbles up to me. Having that identified, designated partnership between two people [is helpful],” she says.
Business partnering is important even at the pinnacle of an organization—all the way to the C-suite. Vena’s own CEO, Hunter Madeley, says finance teams have an important dual function: To keep people focused on the organization’s high-level goals and to inspire leaders of different business units to think differently.
Having the C-suite on your side is an asset in this regard.
Partnering with the C-suite can involve bringing new ideas to the business’s leadership, and as Hunter says, that requires a unique ability to inspire camaraderie and bravery.
“A great finance partnership is one where that finance leader has the insight and courage to challenge the way things are being done, but do it in a way that makes it feel like everyone is in it together,” says Hunter.
Finance business partnering is critical to an organization’s success, as it helps disseminate financial insights to every corner of the business. But it often takes a special blend of technical and soft skills to do it effectively, along with a tailored approach for every department you’re working with.
Vena helps finance teams partner with the broader business more effectively by democratizing data through easy-to-use dashboards. These self-serve insights give division leaders a glimpse of what could happen if they tweak their strategies and workflows.
“I felt Vena was worth the investment to give our managers direct access so they could see the performance and occupancy data whenever they wanted,” says Stephen Bates, Chief Financial Officer at care provider Canford Healthcare. “The business and my Board are all very happy with what we've delivered.”
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