Cheat sheet roundup: marketing collab, becoming CFO, and FP&A maturity.

Fall is here, but that doesn’t mean you should just let yourself drift into a pumpkin spice daze. There’s still work to be done. To help you keep on top of your task list, even if the 🎃 spice is calling your name, we’ve rounded up how-to guides for working with marketing, the skills accountants need to become CFO, and measuring your FP&A maturity.

Our usual disclaimer to the wise: You should always look for additional resources and expertise when doing complicated finance work, because it can be very difficult to accurately sum up sophisticated concepts.

With that said, take a look at these useful finance cheat sheets CFO Brew found on LinkedIn this month.

• Wassia Kamon’s “5 ways finance and marketing teams can work together better”: It might seem like finance and marketing teams don’t have a lot in common. As Kamon, VP of finance and corporate controller at the Low Income Investment Fund, describes it, sales and marketing “sell the sizzle not the steak,” while finance is “trained to…stick to the facts.”
  
  But in today’s increasingly cross-functional world, teams from across the organization need to come together in new ways. Kamon offers five suggestions to bridge the gap between marketing and finance. Among her tips, she recommends acknowledging common roadblocks, starting with the big picture, and agreeing on common rules. She gives practical advice on how to accomplish those headline goals: For example, she suggests that clarifying how expenses should be coded and identifying relevant KPIs helps people agree on common rules.
  
• Howard Katzenberg’s “10 skills accountants must build to become CFOs”: It may not be every accountant’s goal to become a CFO, but for those with an eye on the top finance spot, Katzenberg drills down into the essential skills necessary to make the leap into the C-suite. Katzenberg, a former CFO and founder of Glean.ai, a vendor spend management software company, lays out ten skills for accountants to develop on their way to CFO, including analytical thinking, cost management, tech savvy, and customer relations, among others.
  
  He then explains how and why each of the ten skills is necessary. For example, when it comes to developing tech savvy, he recommends “get[ting] comfortable using tools that help analyze business data easily to inform business strategies.”
  
• Erik Lidman’s “The FP&A maturity model”: FP&A is becoming a critical strategic part of the finance function in these uncertain times. But as it grows in importance, organizations need to pay attention to how mature their FP&A in order to modernize it, or risk “hurt[ing] your business badly,” according to Lidman, CEO of Aimplan, an FP&A SaaS company.
  
  Lidman lays out a detailed cheat sheet for finance professionals to analyze where exactly their FP&A falls on the maturity scale. He divides maturity into three states: developing, intermediate, and leading. He then breaks down the various parts of FP&A, like process, functional skills, and technology. For example, under the process category, organizations that have no formal FP&A process would be considered developing, while orgs with integrated processes that extend beyond the finance function have leading FP&A maturity.