From FP&A to Revenue Operations: How Finance Skills Translate Across the Business

Many finance professionals spend their careers deep in financial planning and analysis, but the skills they build along the way have far more reach than a spreadsheet. Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at UpKeep, knows this firsthand.

Jeff joined the Being Planful podcast to share how an early career in FP&A led him to a leadership role in revenue operations, and what that transition reveals about the evolving relationship between finance and the rest of the business.

The FP&A and Revenue Operations Connection

At large companies, FP&A and sales operations can look surprisingly similar.

While at Google, Jeff worked closely with sales operations and began to see the overlap between the two functions. But the specialization that large organizations afford disappears quickly at smaller companies. When Jeff moved into startups, he had to become a generalist, and that shift revealed real gaps.

“When you’re coming into sales ops from an FP&A background, you lack a couple of things,” Jeff explained. “You lack the business acumen from a sales perspective, what it takes to run a successful sale, generating interest, developing engagement, asking great discovery questions, proving value. You don’t learn that in finance.”

Financial planning and analysis is, by nature, quantitative. Knowing finance means knowing the business from a numbers perspective. But a successful business requires FP&A to go beyond the model and build relationships with the teams actually executing, including sales and operations.

How FP&A Skills Strengthen Revenue Operations

FP&A and revenue operations both run on metrics, but they approach them from different angles.

Both functions look at bookings and revenue, for example. Where FP&A uses those figures to drive resource allocation and headcount decisions, revenue operations uses them to understand how prospects move through the sales funnel and convert to customers.

That shared analytical foundation is what made Jeff’s transition possible. “One of the reasons I think great sales ops or rev ops folks come from FP&A backgrounds is because of the rigor of their analytical prowess,” Jeff said. “That is something that’s hard to teach.”

The analytical skill is only part of the equation. Using data to understand what happened is valuable. Using it to inform what will happen next is where FP&A creates real business impact. That requires FP&A professionals to build strong relationships with sales operations, so the insights flowing into financial models reflect the reality of how deals are won and lost.

“Understanding the nuts and bolts of our sales motion,” Jeff noted, is what makes FP&A models more accurate. “How long does it take to close a deal? What’s the distribution of deals that aren’t gonna close, and by what segments? Those are great pieces of insight that you can then place into any sort of FP&A model.”

Jeff also explored sales commissions, quota design, sales bonus disputes, and the complexity of managing multiple data sources tied to sales performance.

The throughline is clear: finance professionals who deeply understand their area of the business in both financial and operational terms become invaluable partners to FP&A.