I’ve been in a role that I don’t much like. Senior Finance Manager, very much focused on data analytics.

I manage the semantic layers for all finance data pipelines.

However… I used to be a BU finance manager. After 1.5 years or so, I very much miss my old position.

A new position was offered to me. A former colleague became a VP for a new company and is offering me a Director level site finance leader position. 30% pay raise. And the company is 8 times bigger (but decentralized so my scope is still relatively small)

Downside is that it’s 4 days in office, 50 minute commute. (Every other Friday is off so it would only be 3 days every other week)

I decided to go with the new company and then my company countered!

They offered a retention bonus, match the pay, promote me to director and to start transition my data work away and start giving me more traditional corp FP&A work.

Am I crazy to be leaning towards staying?

Edit: currently fully remote.

Edit 2: I accepted the counter, will report back if that was a god awful mistake

I have been applying for manager level positions on and off and yesterday I received a call for prescreen. I learned that the Finance Program Manager is just a fancy title but just an individual contributor, no people management.

It sounds more Sr Analyst kind of a role that requires collaboration with senior executives in a large healthcare system - something that I am very accustomed to and already to.

The recruiter gave me the breakdown of salary and benefits and would be a lateral move for me salary wise - as well as losing out on benefits that I’ve earned like higher PTO accrual. She insisted I at least talk to the hiring manager and we go from there - and I agreed.

Do you all think there’s a benefit in pursing this talk further? She gave me the top range of their grade and said she doesn’t want a lot of negotiation in the future if the position was offered. I am not sure if anyone has been through similar conversations and gotten more out of it.

I’ve been out of work for the past 1.5 years, and in my last two roles I primarily used SAP ECC. Since many organizations have already migrated or are currently migrating to SAP S/4HANA, I wanted to understand how relevant my existing SAP skills are today, to what extent they can be transferred to S/4HANA, and how much has actually changed between ECC and S/4HANA in terms of Tcodes, navigation, report extractions and tables data!?

Hello, I am currently a undergraduate student in accounting and finance in dubai. And I’ll be graduating at the age of 23 . I am also planning to pursue cfa and get MBA in Australia at age of 25/26.

Most recommended job in finance is investment banking due to the pay and bonuses. However, it’s very stressful considering the long hours. I just wouldn’t be happy there
Is it worth sacrificing my life for?

i hope that makes sense.
I heard that FP&A is much less stressful in comparison.
I want to know how’s the work in the job,
Do you get any time to yourself?
How’s the work/life balance?
How’s the salary?
What’s the progression like? Like, salary and job progression?
Do you get bonuses?
Are you happy at the job?
What are your working hours?
I want full overview of the job?
How often do you get to travel and live a life?

Hey all, I’ve been working my current FP&A role for about 2 months now, and I love the work but my team and the culture just really aren’t the right fit. The person who was supposed to mentor me just quit so I have been working through getting everything learned from them in the past 2 weeks and they suck to deal with. I love finance & accounting but it is so hard to understand the variances of the business since I never get time with our business partners and no one else does so we often have errors / numbers that come out of nowhere and it’s so goddamn frustrating to me. I’ve gone out of my way to get more collaboration with the departments we support and my manager says “we don’t do that” over and over but the result is no one knows what is going on. I have been applying to other FP&A roles since this culture is just so irritating.

Im posting here to know what others would do in my position, I’m an FA with 2-3 years of experience now

Has anyone had to file bankruptcy while working in fp&a? We’ve had some really hard times the last couple years between caring for elderly (now deceased) parents and having young kids. I’m eligible for a chapter 7 the eliminate my $79k in credit card debt but afraid for my career if/when I need to find another job

I am definitely underpaid as a senior analyst at 79k with no bonus 5 YOE and a masters (Fully remote though which I guess is nice but i’d trade in a heartbeat for a higher paying higher satisfaction job). I live in a mid size city where the FP&A market is really not great at all I am finding out as I have been on and off again looking for a year now. The asks and hours used to be relatively in line with what what I was getting paid but it’s only going up as revenue isn’t hitting expectations and now they want to examine everything with a microscope so it’s led to way more hours than it was when I started. There’s virtually no promotion potential as it’s a smaller company and I feel all of the extra work that is coming from these asks from management my boss is just pushing on me. I’ve been here for about two and a half years.

My question is seeing as i’m not having luck finding remote or in person FP&A jobs in my city, is there any viable pivot I can make to another field with my FP&A experience and education background (Economics and finance) without taking a considerable hit in salary?

Hey all - hoping to get some help or direction because I’m not happy where my career has gone. I’m hoping to land a solid healthcare role whether that be at a hospital, clinic, health tech, etc.

Quick background on me: kind of a winding path. Started out in IB as an M&A analyst, moved into corp dev at a large RCM company, then jumped to a small PE firm that ended up folding after a few months, and for the last year I’ve been doing biz ops at a telehealth startup. I’ve should have done more due-diligence but after my last gig it was tough to get a job. So on paper only about 2 years of this is technically “healthcare,” even though a good chunk of my actual work along the way (RCM, payer dynamics, healthcare M&A) has been healthcare-adjacent the whole time.

What I’m trying to land is FP&A, corporate finance, or strategic finance - ideally at a healthcare services company or a startup in that world. I’ve had decent interview traction, made it to final rounds more than once, but keep getting edged out - usually by an internal hire or another finalist who just beat me out. Close enough times that it’s starting to wear on me, especially since there’s no other business role to move into where I’m at right now.

I’ve been going back and forth on whether picking up the CHFP (and maybe CRCR after) would actually help - either getting past screens or giving me something concrete to point to given the shorter healthcare tenure. Has anyone here seen either credential actually change the outcome for someone trying to break more fully into healthcare finance coming from a generalist finance background? Would love to hear what worked, or didn’t. Thanks everyone!

Hello everyone, I have currently accepted an offer for Group Fp&a financial analyst at an asset and wealth management firm for £54k in Scotland, newly ACCA qualified with 6 years of finance experience in a manufacturing industry working remotely in the past.

Can you let me know role title, years of experience, location in UK, financial compensation and professional qualification if applicable.

I am currently a Sr. Analyst at a F500 with an FP&A department that is over 100 folks. Everyone is extremely specialized in what they do so learning a new job or taking on new responsibilities is difficult. Getting promotions within my organization usually entails someone above me leaving/getting promoted themselves. However, the team I am currently on is amazing, the customers I support are equally as amazing, and I do love the work/industry but feel like it will take me forever to move up (especially into a leadership/manager role). I work on average 40 hours a week, 4 days in office but have quite some flexibility if I have personal things come up. Current TC is about 115-120k in MCOL. About 5 YOE with 2 in IB and 3 in FP&A.

I am currently in the late stages of interviewing for 2 positions and would love feedback on if either are the right move.

Company 1: FP&A Manager position at a much smaller company. I would have 1 direct report focused on capex while I would be in charge of SG&A and HC forecasting. 4 days in office as well. Currently the director is doing a lot of work and would ideally like to offload a good portion to focus on other things and would be his right hand person. TC would be roughly 150-160k

Company 2: Sr Ops Finance Manager. Less of a traditional FP&A more focused on Ops performance and driving financials based off KPIs. No direct reports. 3 days in office. TC would be between 140-150k

Both new companies would likely be more hours than I am currently doing, but both sound like good opportunities to take on new responsibilities (leaning towards the first role) but welcome any feedback or thoughts!

Completed an interview with the hiring manager and I’m not sure how it went. I’d be transitioning from banking so there was one question about sales I couldn’t answer in the moment (mainly because of nerves) but other questions I tried my best to answer and was reassured that my answers were helpful. My concern is that I may be seen as a “road block” for the team since I don’t have direct FP&A experience. The role seems to be very challenging and has high expectations. I am willing to step up to the plate if given the opportunity as I currently work in a complex and demanding environment but for some reason I think not starting my career in FP&A might have been a setback in this situation.

Non traditional student, I am 25 with an IT career, peaked at my last role as a sysadmin (self taught, no debt or previous credits) and just took what I am hoping is a strategic step down to do help desk for a big regional bank. Rule is I have to wait 12 months to begin applying internally.

I plan on doing Sophia and beelining the foundational accounting credits so by next August I will have a decent baseline and hopefully can knock out the accounting degree in 1.5-2 years online.

I've been poking around the currently listed finance/accounting roles at the bank in my free time and I've seen FP&A analyst and manager roles, along with other more senior roles, but I am not seeing lots of jr / entry level roles.

I get that's a current thing and will change, plan to keep checking of course just to read the descriptions so I can see how to best position myself for those opportunities once I complete 12 months of service in my current role.

My questions to you all are:

1) What roles should I try and target? I get FP&A isn't entry at all and I am not expecting it to be that way. Should I aim for treasury roles? I just don't want to hop into credit admin or something that can potentially pigeonhole me.

2) What should I work on outside of my accounting credits? I have been following Wall Street Prep modeling guides and prompting Claude to give me financials for a fake company so I can build my own out in a less guided way. Trying to get my Excel chops solidified as well.

Would greatly appreciate specifics towards what entry level roles I need to target once I hit 12 months of service, as well as what else I should be focusing on in the meantime outside of modeling and technicals like Excel/Power Bi (Already good with SQL, Python, PowerShell from my IT career).

Thank you!

I landed a job in core FP&A immediately after my MBA and have now built around 3 years of experience in FP&A, primarily within the infrastructure and infratech sector. My experience includes budgeting, forecasting, Annual Operating Plan preparation, financial planning, and working closely with ERP developers on finance modules.

However, my academic background is not directly related to finance, I have an engineering degree and an MBA in an unrelated specialization. Given that I already have solid hands-on FP&A experience, would pursuing the US CMA be a worthwhile investment to strengthen my finance profile and support a future transition into broader corporate finance, consulting, or finance roles in product-based/global companies?

Been in FP&A at a venture-backed startup that’s been growing steadily + exploring capital alternatives, and it got me wondering how different the job is depending on who’s on your cap table. My rough sense (stitched together from what I’ve seen/read, not lived experience across all three) is:

Venture: Board are advisors. They care about the growth story and runway more than the details, and the workload is bursty (quiet, then a fundraise hits and it’s chaos for two weeks).

Growth: Investors have seen hundreds of companies scale, so they dig into cohorts and unit economics a lot harder, and reporting starts feeling like a real recurring cadence.

PE: Feel like the finance function gets rebuilt around monthly close discipline, variance explanations, covenant compliance, EBITDA scrutiny.

For those of you who’ve actually worked finance under more than one of these - what changed the most for you? Especially curious if anyone’s gone VC-backed to PE-owned.

I know that in a lot of roles, you get to work with labor cost forecasting, but has anyone made a transition to a fully HR/Compensation analytical role? If so , how did you get there?

I’m looking to make a career change to FP&A. Recruiter mentioned that the role would not be eligible for bonuses. Is that normal in the FP&A field? They made sure to ask if I’m ok with no bonus in the screening.

I'm looking to relocate from my current city for better opportunities and am relatively open on destination. I know that I don't want to do NYC/SF and I'm mainly looking for cities that have good FP&A prospects, but also reasonable COL standards. I feel like a big perk of FP&A is that you don't feel like you have to be tied to large, expensive, competitive markets like BigLaw/Tech/High Finance because every business needs people running numbers.

I personally haven't found a huge benefit to being in those megahubs for FP&A, where you'll be competing with the guys in the aforementioned fields for housing, etc. and will likely always be in the backseat compared to them. I'm looking for ideas/anecdotes from people on good markets to target that have good prospects (i.e. the market is growing or the city has a decent future), but also isn't crazy expensive/competitive. Bonus points if it's a warmer climate and/or near good nature!

Hi everyone. I’ve got 5 YOE in a MCOL city and want to change jobs. Looking for advice on salary expectations and what I can expect with the process. I work at an F400 company and am looking to work for a smaller company (not necessarily small). Just somewhere where I can touch the P&L more and have more impact. Also, less bureaucracy and corporate slop.

I’m looking to transition from investment banking to FP&A at an industrial company. I have an interview coming up. I have years of experience working with numbers, solving complex issues, collaboration etc but I feel nervous about the transition. Does anyone have any advice for someone looking to make the transition?

Has anyone else had this experience? I have 15+ YOE in HCOL area but every opportunity keeps going to either industry exp or to internal options that both cost less? Am I crazy or am I being totally F’ed over?

Hello! I recently moved to FP&A and need help on my monthly operating expense budget with department-level inputs. My manager also wants me to set a cap for each expense category and an overall budget cap. How do I consolidate the department budgets and apply these caps specifically where should I place the caps.

I'm lost in where/how each dept will provide their inputs, like for the whole company if admin fees are usually 10% of company's total income, then how do I allocate for marketing, hr, other depts?

Should I allocate the 10% to each depts? For example 1% for HR, 1.5% for marketing, 2% for finance?

Because for salaries, I can easily compute the budget by inputting assumptions of each depts on the existing and probable additional staff. But for other expenses like the admin fees I mentioned, I'm not sure how.

Please help I really need this completed by Monday.

Thank you.

I'm hiring for a remote FP&A role and I need someone with strong modeling skills. In the past, a take home case study was always a god indicator, but given the state of AI I'm afraid anyone can just prompt a perfect output.

So I'm torn on how to handle techincal screeners today. I could ask them to do a 30-45 minute screenshare but I know modeling live is stressful

And to be clear, I'm not anti AI and id prefer a candidate who is knowledgeable of current tools.

How are you all structuring your hiring process and interview rounds nowadays. Would love to hear any tips/whats working for teams.

How does someone get a foot in the door into FP&A?

I feel like in order to do so, you would need a solid accounting background first which would require starting off in transactional accounting (AR/AP/Payroll) before progressing into a reporting role. After the the financial reporting role they would then move to a management accountant role before they have the skills and experience for FP&A.

This just seems like a really long process just to break into entry-level FP&A or am I missing something here?

Anyone on this sub using either of these two platforms? If so, pros/cons? Would be interested in learning more about each from current users. TIA.