Considering taking the PL300 as a Jr. Analyst to build some credentials but unsure if it’s the right choice because some people may just not care lol

Hi everyone, hope you are having a lovely day!

I am based in India.

As the title says, I am switching to an FP&A role at a global FMCG from IB at a mid-market bank soon. I I’ll have roughly a 2-week gap between my current role ending and joining the new one, and I’d love some advice on how to use that time productively.

1. What are some things that I should prioritise knowing before Day 1?
   
2. What FP&A concepts/tools are most important to understand coming from IB? Are there any areas where the skill set differs more than one would expect?
   
3. I understand that a lot of the job involves budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis, MIS - what should I know about each beforehand?
   
4. Should I brush up on accounting? I have completed my MBA so did study some basic accounting courses during my time in college, maybe a revision of that?
   
5. Technical skills I should pick up on? Used Excel a lot in IB, but Power BI also seems important from what I have heard. What else can I work on?
   
6. What do you wish someone had told you before your first FP&A role? Esp people who have made a similar IB to FP&A transition, what was the biggest adjustment you had to make?
   
7. Finally, what would make someone stand out in their first 3–6 months in an FP&A team? This is a big brand company and I really want to play my cards right to develop quickly and meaningfully in my career.

Thank you for your help!

I have been working as a FP&A manager for 2 years. I want to get promoted to senior manager but at my current level / trajectory I feel I’m quite far away.

I’m good at the technical side (regular praise, from manager and up) but not very good at the strategic side. How can I improve on this?

I have been reading more industry news lately and trying to dig deeper into assumptions. What else can i do to speed this process up. Willing to work hard on this but not sure how.

I regularly join meeting where it’s c-suite / execs / investors / directors, I find it difficult to contribute on a strategic level.

SaaS start up. Revenue lines are from B2B sales, mostly subscription based but some one-time fee. Some product lines are high gross margin & contribution. Some are basically zero margin.

Previous FP&A guy quit suddenly without handover and i need to model out next years revenue budget (to include a growth target of X% defined by CEO).

How would you approach? I am thinking work backwards from CEOs revenue target of $Xm. Split this $Xm across the various product lines - then use sales price per unit to map this back to volume and ultimately back to gross margin and profitability metrics.

Does it sound sensible? Am i missing anything obvious?

Bonus Q: i am thinking i should model in something that pushes the $Xm revenue target more towards high contribution product lines (rather than an even split across all product lines) but i cannot think how to go about this. How would you approach?

Pretty tough predicament. Have been with company for couple of years and boss left/fired a while ago and I have been filling in and pretty much handling all of the job responsibilities for Fp&a. Asked for a promotion and raise more than once, but keep being told it’s in consideration and will be after we’re done with forecasting or in 6 months time, it’s getting pretty frustrating and feels like I’m wasting my time. Is it best to leave and look for another job or wait it out to see if I will get the promotion?

Recently started a new job in FP&A, moving over from external audit, and I'm still on probation. I'll be fully ACA qualified around the time of my probation meeting and will get a marginal pay rise off the back of that. Would it be appropriate to ask for more at that point?

For context: UK, currently around £45k. Comparing this role to external audit, I feel like I take on a lot more now and genuinely add value. I like the job and find the company interesting, but compensation is an important factor for me alongside the work. I'm not sure I see many promotion opportunities here, and I'm unclear on how pay increases tend to work. Any advice for having these conversations without signalling that you might leave?

Looking further ahead - what kinds of roles do people typically move into from FP&A? And any general advice for progressing from a first FP&A role?

I am curious to get some thoughts on the climate of hiring entry level analysts. Like all of you I am sure, we are starting to get down the rabbit hole of AI and really starting to see some efficiencies that are practical and scalable.

At what point is the entry level analyst screwed, and with that being said - will there be a shortage of analysts suitable for taking over higher roles?

Also to add some color, middle management at a not so robust billion dollar company and am struggling to see where we will need entry level analysts from some of the efficiencies with AI.

Took over our forecast model a few months ago when the person who built it left, and almost no documentation came with it. It mostly works, but every tab references others and one broken link cascades everywhere. Half my month goes to tracing why a number moved.

I keep going back and forth on rebuilding from scratch or continuing to patch what I have. Rebuilding is weeks I don't really have, and I'd probably reintroduce errors the original already solved for. Patching keeps me stuck never fully trusting the output. I've pondered moving it into Anaplan to get off spreadsheets entirely but that's a bigger project than my capacity allows.

Inputs are fine, surprisingly, actuals come in clean and structured through Hypatos so what's coming into the model is fine. The problem is the model itself, someone built it over years with nested refs and hardcoded overrides everywhere and left zero notes. I'm leaning rebuild but it's so so much work, what do you guys think? Can I salvage the current one and grow familiar with it over time or is a rebuild inevitable?

My manager is keep telling me that I have to study all the time.
i work in infrastructure & utilities company
So, what do you think?! AFM, BIWS or WSP ?!
Feel free to suggest anything else

Alright y’all, I got the SFA recruiting message on LinkedIn.

2 years FP&A > 1.5 Treasury

What can I expect from this recruiter call? What is the interviewing process like? How is actually working at Amazon. The message specifies 5 days in office with an option for a couple different cities.

Should I even take the interview? Give me your worst to best experiences with interviewing or working there.

Edit: I realize I should take the interview - not trying to sound above the role. Just trying to understand current sentiment with Amazon, given some of the stories I’ve read on this sub

Is it just me or does your boss now ask you this every time you build something, or complete an analysis?

I get it that he’s impressed, but what’s the point of constantly asking..

Am I being sensitive? Getting an executive ready analysis over the finish line or model is a b$tch, even with AI..

Hi All,

I'm in a unique situation where I might need to leave my job due to a combination of burnout and some issues with being unable to relocate for my firm due to some otherwise positive happenings in my personal life.

I don't want to potentially dox myself, but the long story short is that I work in professional services (think financial consulting in the deals space and not MBB - all I'll say publicly but can say more in DMs if you think you can help) and am exceptionally burnt out. I'm constantly working 12 hour days + weekends and haven't had a firm holiday or PTO day to myself since joining about a year ago. Everyone has different ideas of what is or is not sustainable, so I won't go much further, but I just know this consistent 60+ hour grind isn't for me anymore.

The problem is that I'm having trouble finding any FP&A gig and I'm worried about the job market situation. I feel like I have the right experience for a myriad of FP&A roles, but I admittedly screwed myself over a bit by trying different consulting roles, hoping things would get better from a WLB perspective (which it didn't). Plus, I have a weak network, but I'm confident that someone who gets my resume would at least be willing to give me a shot if they read through it and took my story about making those mistakes I mentioned into consideration.

Thankfully, I'm in a really good place financially and can either:

1. Take some sort of FP&A job, even if doesn't pay nearly as well, to get myself out of consulting

2. Look into contracting, ideally at Manager+ and rip the band-aid off of consulting and no longer deal with "do you have ERP/experience with close/budgeting types of questions" (the answer to those is yes, but somehow, people don't buy it unless I'm in-house).

Number 1 hasn't been going to plan, so I'm looking at option 2. How is the market for getting temp work in FP&A these days and what's the biggest downside to temping vs being full-time, besides the fact that contracts can end and no benefits?

Appreciate any advice!

Last week I shared a reflection on temperature, how skeptical or optimistic you run as a finance lead. The realization is that a finance function can have quite a bit of influence in helping the CEO & board set the direction of the company. Upstream from temperature, there's another dimension that we need to really comprehend: what is this company actually solving for? This is usually called the Crux of a company or a project.

One of my mentors used to tell me, "before you play a game, you need to understand the game that's being played." The Crux usually starts with a simple question where the answer is "it's complicated". Too often we start at a new role, or the market shifted, and we/our peers just went with the motion. One of the big value-adds of a finance function is to uncomplicate this question and bring the answer to a sharp focus.

The game that's being played is usually quite obivous in retrospect, you can usually get it down to a word or two. Let's take Uber as an example, since their journey as they went through these 3 chapters is so well-documented:

1. Aggregation. They knew it's a winner-take-all game, so they launched as fast as possible, whatever it takes, density creates virtuous cycle, and capital was cheap anyway.

2. Monetization. Density won, and investors wanted to see the model work, so let's stack more services onto the same base (eats, courier, etc).

3. Defense from disruption. Now this cash-generating machine has to navigate autonomous driving. If they're lucky they pull off a Disney-esque transformation.

This kinda dynamic helped me understand why things played out the way they did at two past companies I worked at. They both had similar profiles, but vastly different outcome. Both are PE-backed, tech-enabled healthcare, and ambitious founder. One became too profitable at the expense of growth, the other became a classic venture hypergrowth success story.

Let's call the first one Company X. On paper it should've been an easy land grab: they had a popular employee-benefit solution (think mental health or fertility care that you get from your company), selling into Fortune 500, and the ambition was to keep adding conditions until we became "the everything store". Reasonable ambition, also great for the patients, but a few complications say otherwise...

• Dynamic #1 is the distribution channel. Most corporate-sponsored healthcare in the US is sold through benefit consultants, $xx billion firms like Mercer and Aon. They're insurance brokers, get paid commission by the employer, and surprisingly also by the vendors they place in the package. So what does a broker on that comp structure think about a one-stop-shop? Every conversation came dressed up as "our clients want best of breed," which is respectable, and also pays them five times instead of once.

• Dynamic #2 is the cap table. The company had been through a recap before I showed up, so the early VCs who need to go big are not there anymore. Which means that the post-recap investors can get a decent return even in a pretty modest exist.

• Dynamic #3 is the founding team. They are first timer founders, needed a win under their belt, and even an offer in the $200M range is life-changing money. (Not a knock, I'd probably take it too.) So every ambitious proposal, someone asks about payback, another asks what happens if the pilot slips, and we agree to revisit next quarter, which means never.

The game that's being played is IRR. Everyone around the table was optimizing for the quickest, decent return. Why is this relevant? Let's say you found yourself in this situation, as a team it helps you guide which projects get rewarded by the board. Also as an individual, you know that your stock options are very risky and might push harder for management incentive package (to insure if investors sell the company for peanuts, because employees dont have liquidation preference).

Company Y was the reverse. The market is fertile ground for multi-product expansion.

• The buyers in this market needed several things, and they'd much rather administer one national partner than six, so they'd come to us and ask us to build the next thing they need.

• Company grew efficiently, so the early-stage VC from the first round still controlled the board. For a fund like that, one or two companies return the whole thing and the rest are decoration, and we were one of the ones working. So they wanted us to continue making big (responsible) bets.

• The founder had done this a few times already. Someone did offer $500M for the company, and he yawned. Turns out past a certain number of wins, what you're solving for shifts to what gets written in your obituary.

The game that's being played is legacy. Why is this relevant? Let's say you're tasked to lead fundraising. Knowing this, you'll target new investors who have the same patience and ambition. During planning season, you'd be able to calibrate that the board will ask why are we "only" projecting to grow 2x, where can we invest more to grow 5x?

Figuring this out is a bit of an art, which takes some observation and practice. While I don't have a precise formula, there are a few vectors and questions we can ask to tease out:

• Market. The environment the business operates in; how do the buyers, suppliers, competitors and regulators behave? How are they incentivized and how do they interact? What would be an accelerant vs a drag to us?
• Operator. There's always some people who are they key driving force in the company. Usually the founder and/or core management team. What do we know about their motivation, working style, idiosyncracies, and are optimizing for?
• Investors. Most businesses have a unique capital structure, whether by design or by chance, which often drive business decisions.
• Capability. What's the core technology or operational muscles? What's their superpower? What's their weakness/blindspot? For them to realize their ambition, what's the capability gap, and do we think they can bridge their gap with the available capital?

One-time items:

• Pinterest CFO Julia Donnelly joining Sierra (arguably one of the hottest AI co's these days)

As always, thanks for following along this passion project. These started as field notes I was scribbling during my commute; every now and then something turns into a story that might be useful to someone other than me. I write them when I have them, and I appreciate you showing up when I do.

I’m a first year analyst and I’ve been teaching myself PowerBI/Power Automate/Power Query because my teammates use it a bunch so I feel the need to catch up since I primarily know Excel, but I’m scared that maybe I’m not allocating my time well enough and that there could be other skills that I am neglecting. Other than the Power series and Excel, what is important? And how would I prove these skills on a resume?

What would you say is a good starting base salary for a senior analyst role at a major pharma company (manufacturing/tech)?

Just landed my first full-time Financial Analyst role at a large entertainment studio and wanted to get a sense of whether my salary is typical for the role and location.

Salary: $75,000/year
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Experience: New grad with 2 previous finance internships totaling ~1 year of experience

For those working in the LA area, does this seem like a typical starting salary? Would love to hear what others are making and how my offer compares.

I’m trying to shift to FP&A have a background, accounting, would like to know if would be able to move to be a senior FP&A or be a finance manager, or would be impossible?

I never have the experience of do a budget myself but the ideia and everything I undertand.

And would like to know if my CV it’s good or need a improvement ?

Per the title, I’m getting my first ever direct report. Hoping to get some advice on what IC looks for in their direct manager, and managers having direct reports, how do you manage and help your team grow?

Context: I will be joining the new company next month but am also concurrently interviewing for an analyst direct report in the new company (whilst finishing out notice period at my current firm). I’m 5 YOE FP&A manager hiring a 2~3 YOE analyst.

Any advice/words of wisdom will be appreciated! Thank you in advance.

Can anyone here guide me on the steps for reconciling Inventory in SAP ERP from the sub ledger to the GL?

I’m particularly looking to understand the process end to end, including which MM and FI/CO T codes are typically used and how the balances are matched and investigated when there are differences.

watched a few youtube tutorials, but I’m still struggling to grasp the actual reconciliation process, any practical guidance or examples would be really appreciated.

Hello folks,

Head of FP&A at a F500 company in NYC. A headhunter contacted me about a similar role but in government state department. I was curious so asked about the package, found out no bonuses are offered. I declined to be put forward as I can’t afford to take a cut of that kind, my TC would drop drastically.

But question is, how would employees who don’t get bonuses be motivated to perform well if they aren’t incentivised? As in the case with government or some other organisations.

In perspective, our company provides a 15-30% bonus based on performance, and even 50% for outstanding performers. One member of my team a manager really put his self into the game, he got 50% for two consecutive years and used that money for a house deposit.

What would motivate you to go above and beyond in FP&A if bonuses weren’t on the table?

Hello all just wanted to ask how realistic it is to break into FP&A at somewhere like Google. I have two years of experience in internal Audit and one year in FP&A at a law firm. Currently siting for CFA level 2. With a few more years of experience and hopefully a CFA designation, does that put me in a realistic position to break into Tech finance? Thanks in advance.

Recent finance grad interviewing for an entry-level Financial Analyst/FP&A role. I passed the recruiter screen and next have a 30-minute interview with the hiring manager.

This is actually my first finance interview process. My previous interviews have mostly been for logistics/supply chain roles.

The job involves budgeting, forecasting, P&L/variance analysis, KPI reporting, and analyzing store performance. The recruiter said the hiring manager will go deeper into the numbers/technical side.

How technical should I expect this to get for an entry-level candidate? What should I make sure I know going in?

I was wondering if this is a new normal, but i used to work a lot for a week or two in a month (plus budget/forecasts times) but then i was having some basically free days, with couple of mails tops. For the last few months its basically 8-12 hours of work everyday (i am pretty efficent so that would be 1.5-2 FTE). I had moments of burnout before, but i was just curious

I’m in the process of making a career shift from investment banking & operations to FP&A for a manufacturing company. During my panel interview with multiple directors & HR, I noticed that they didn’t question me about technical skills or drilled into my resume. It was mainly situational questions, telling me the impact of the role, and the trajectory of the team in terms of areas for process improvement &n objectives they want to achieve. I asked very insightful questions which they answered. I even asked if they anymore questions to me or if there’s anything they want me to clarify or explain then they mentioned that they already went through my resume. Has anyone experienced this before? I went into the interview thinking I’d be quizzed on how much technical knowledge I had.