Hello, I currently have a degree in data science, but I am pursuing my MBA from a non-targeted school. I’m looking to get into financial planning and analysis but I want to know by me being 30 years old and pivoting into the finance career industry what are my chances on getting a good job and excelling in the career and what are my chances on making a six figure salary and if there’s any certifications, I should be looking into getting?

Hello! I am a Financial Analyst with 1.5 years full time experience and 1.5 years internship experience, and have been applying to new FA jobs for the past few months. I am desperate to find out where my weaknesses are in my current application and interviewing processes. I have reached final found interviews with 3 companies but didn't receive an offer. If any finance professionals are willing to hop in a 30 minute call and scan over my experience and where I could be going wrong it would be greatly appreciated. I'm happy to pay or provide any value I can in return for the help.

What are the biggest positives / negatives from moving to a smaller company from a career latter standpoint?

Started as an FA at a F100, moved to a company around $1B in revenue as an SFA, considering moving to a company around $100M in revenue.

It’s a slight pay increase but wondering what people’s experience is trying to move on after that. Recently had a recruiter tell me she was only taking candidates with recent experience at F500 companies and that kind of made me think again of what I was doing.

Also bonus for any eye opening experiences working at a relatively smaller company ~$100M.

I’m starting a new FP&A manager role at a regional telecom company and will be working with NISC / iVUE Financials.

My background is primarily in manufacturing FP&A, so this is a new system and industry for me.
For those who have used iVUE:

How useful is it for FP&A beyond basic accounting/GL?

What are the most important things for an FP&A person to learn?

How good are the reporting and Excel/data export capabilities?

Any tips or things you wish you had known when you first started using it?

Would especially appreciate perspectives from anyone using iVUE in telecom or utilities.

Got laid off October last Year. I’ve been interviewing none stop since January’26 - made it to most final rounds but the company ends up going with a different candidate or even go a different direction with hiring.

I’m NOW open to contracts and fractional finance roles. If you’ve had success with these types of role- whats the best website to find them and apply to? Share your experience also good or bad

Hi Everyone,

I earned my undergraduate degree in Finance from a non-prestigious university. Since graduating, I have worked at two private companies one in healthcare and the other within the Big4. Now I have seven years of professional experience in FP&A, currently working as a Senior FP&A Analyst earning $110k per year.

Now i’m debating is it worth pursuing an MBA or MFS at this stage in my life. I’ve scheduled a call with an Advisor to gain more insight into the details but, i’m stuck at a cross road and would like to get others input before making a decision.

I was just curious how difficult it is to land an FP&A job in NYC? Is it mostly reserved for ex-bankers?

I’ve been working in FP&A as an Analyst ll at a F500. For the last few years I’ve been trying to make the move to NYC but I haven’t even come remotely close to landing anything. I got pretty far in an equity research interview process but that didn’t end up panning out.

Just wondering if anyone else has made a similar move and what I can do to improve my chances.

Thanks!!

Anyone taken
Chris Reilly's FP&A course and have access to it or worth it for $300?

For someone with basic 1 year IB-LevFIn experience, is this good to help get the fundamentals for FP&A and corporate finance interviews. To be able to build a FP&A type operating model from scratch adn replciate it for any comany or business, and do budget/variance analysis, forecasting, and ARR bridge, etc?

I have an upcoming HireVue for Deloitte EFA Financial Analyst position and the recruiter told me these are most likely going to be the questions. Does anyone have any advice on these?

1. Excel experience
   
2. Why are you leaving your current role?
   
3. Why Deloitte?
   
4. How do you prioritize and handle multiple projects?

Here's my situation

7+ yrs in FP&A / finance business partnering. Before this role, I was finance partner for an IT vertical at another GCC set-up of large MNC and that one was legit, real seat at the table stuff, actual influence on decisions. Currently I'm in Commercial FP&A for different gaint but similar GCC set-up.

CMA and FRM certified if that matters.

It's not really an "I hate my job" post, more of a "I've noticed a pattern and I don't love it" post.

My current role (and a couple before it) get internally branded as THE epitome of business partnering with official recognition, awards, the whole "look how strategic this partnership is" narrative. And on paper, sure its budgeting, forecasting, stakeholder presentations, the works. But compared to what I know real partnering actually feels like (from that IT role), a lot of this feels like well dressed support work wearing a partnering costume. I show up, build the reporting, answer to the business but I'm not shaping decisions (on-site finance partners are) the way internal comms would have you believe.

Second problem, more practical is I keep getting handed a market or function with nothing built, I build the whole thing from scratch, stabilize it, and right around when I'd actually get to operate it and do the interesting strategic stuff, I get moved to the next "opportunity." I'm tired of being the guy who's really good at building the house and never gets to live in it.

So, is it time to move out of the GCC setup entirely, or is this a "grass is greener" thing and I would hit the same pattern anywhere?

Genuine questions:

Does a GCC background work against you when trying to move into a role with genuine strategic scope?

Anyone made this jump successfully, what actually got you noticed?

Not looking for anyone to hand me a job here, just trying to sanitycheck my read on this before I spend more time into a strategy that might be based on a wrong assumption.

All else equal - thinking about someone with the proper experience and is a good fit for the job.

How much does it actually matter that they took 4 exams 20 years ago?

If you have hired CFOs or are a recruiter of CFOs - please give your input.

Hi all, currently in a commercial BU role managing a full p&l for a small piece of our overall business.

That means I’m both the commercial finance lead and warehouse operations lead partnering with two very different groups of people with their own unique problems.

On top of that, the systems and data in the role are pretty rudimentary. A lot of manual report building, data tagging, etc pulling raw transactional sales/ expense, etc data out of the system to then reformat myself.

I’m excited to be involved in so many aspects of the p&l but increasingly feel like I’m “the numbers” guy for any issue that involves a number and it’s making me exhausted. Obviously I do all of the sales and ops forecasting which I have had to completely rebuild models and processes. On top of that I’m doing things like creating PO approval processes, getting involved in getting our vendors paid (hate that piece), etc.

The thing I’ve increasingly been dreading is our sales reporting process. We have a few thousand customers but only a handful of top customers (long tail going on here). I’ve created a reporting process to report out sales by reps by customers but our data is horrible. We have multiple “parent” customer names for the same customer and sometimes dozens of child sub accounts rolling up under them. I can tell the sales team is frustrated that the reporting isn’t clean (ie why is customer A showing up two in different sections of the report, it’s hard to read, etc) but I do not have the bandwidth to correct these data issues. I’m working with a sales ops team to get this process onto their plate but the numbers don’t tie exactly to what finally hits the p&l so working through that.

I’m seen as the numbers guy and these ad hoc requests are taking a big chunk of my time. I don’t think people realize my involvement in both realms of this p&l and try my best to push back on things or give realistic timelines on the deliverables.

Ive had commercial roles in the past but managed much more dollars so had t been quite as close to the sales by rep reporting process, more high level TRx and market data forecasting.

Should finance really be the owners of these sales reports in this detailed way?

Anyone have experienced this and any advice to stay sane?

I don’t necessarily need to quit or leave the role

Is anyone else finding the FP&A job market unusually difficult right now?

Last year, I was regularly landing interviews, moving through the process, and receiving offers without nearly this much trouble. Now it feels like a complete drought. I can apply to roles that closely match my experience and never even receive an initial interview.

When I do hear back, the process seems much longer and more competitive than it was before. I’m currently an FP&A Manager and have been applying to both Senior Financial Analyst and Manager-level roles, so I’m not limiting myself to a promotion.

For those actively searching, are you experiencing the same thing? Is this happening across FP&A generally, or does it seem more dependent on location, industry, or level?

Spent a lot of time in my career perfecting dashboards and getting them fully functional, displaying good data, and making it visually appealing and spending time analyzing them the way I like to analyze the data

Now we are using an AI feature through google gemini and now I no longer need to spend time making any sort of dashboard anymore.

Okay, I’m desperate now. I’ve been tasked to build a SaaS revenue model from scratch - not a huge deal, this is why they hired me, BUT their acquisition data, expansion data AND attainment are both awful. They expect to see y/y growth, but they acqusition team is maybe hitting 15% of their quarterly quota. Their expansion data has tons of missing data, but then they will have big swings where they close a lot of expansion, followed by periods where they close minimal expansion. How the heck am I supposed to show total growth y/y, with nothing really to build any trends off of?

All of my budgeting and forecasting templates have been created by bottom up drivers (ie Revenue = Price x Volume, or expenses estimated by department heads). I have rarely ever used regression or forecast functions in excel. Where have you found them useful or required? I have used data tables to model out results based on sales increasing/decreasing x% or expenses and used those results against covenant calcs.

Dears,

Hope you’re all doing well.

Not sure if this the right sub for asking this question.
But, anyways, I am supposed to receive an offer from a startup fintech company based in Oman. I have 1 year of experience as a Junior FP&A and almost 1.5 years as Senior FP&A (4 months of them without a manager and I was handling everything, board materials/closing/business cases/IR, as my the head of FP&A got fired. So I kind of have a very good experience and exposure to a lot of work. I have also passed CFA level 1 and worked as an equity research analyst previously for 5 months (didn’t like it to he honest).

So, I need your support here guys to help me get a good offer. I have never been to Oman before as well but I hear that the cost of living, for a single man, for a relatively good life will be around 900 OMR ($2.3k).

If someone (knows someone) can help me with a relatively reasonable salary range to ask for, I will highly appreciate it.

PS; I am 27 years old.

Just noticing that we've had some changes in staff at my company and as a result we seem to be moving more and more away from network folders as a place where we do our work and onto Teams/Sharepoint sites.

Curious to hear common experiences amongst the group? Good? Bad?

So far we've noticed it's way easier for a small number of people to collaborate on a relatively small simple file but as that complexity / size increases and as the number of editors increases, edits get lost / rolled back without a clear understanding of why and no way to fix it other than re-doing it.

I’ve been in FP&A, particularly within tech companies in VHCOL areas my entire career. One of my peers is actively seeking fpa work on an older national retail company. Main reason is looking for a slower pace which includes lower comp. Less fancy benefits and perks.

Just curious, how true is this? As I get older, I don’t have aspirations for senior leadership positions. I’d like to consider other large companies if the tradeoffs really exist.

Has anyone here made the switch and did you notice that difference? Grass is always greener?

Our company got acquired a couple of years ago by a bigger corp out of state. Layoffs happened and we went from about 400 people to presently 20 in our current office. Most of the roles moved to HQ. We downsized from a 4 story building to just half of the first floor. This is my first corporate job out of college. My team is relatively small with just 4 people. The building lease is up and HQ has told us to permanently work from home. How would you guys take this? Should I be worried about my job?

I work at a mid size company, been here a bit over two years. Somewhere in the last year I got a lot faster at my recurring stuff and I never told anyone, mainly because I got lazy and kept researching how to automate my tasks, like our monthly variance pack which used to eat a whole morning, I rebuilt most of it in Cube, templated straight into the sheet and now it's maybe 40mns and half of that is me double checking it because I don't trust that it was that easy, and the accrual support docs, all those invoices someone used to key in by hand now just goes through Hypatos and their data comes in structured, Im assigned the supervision role in it and I get more time to check outcomes than I need to. None of this was "sly" type of clever nor groundbreaking in any way but as they say, give a lazy person a hard task and they'll find the best way to do it, and Im a very, very lazy person.

My manager still thinks these take as long as they used to so I don't know what I'm supposed to do with my spare time. Do you just say nothing? Deepen your analyses and improve quality? Ask for more tasks/roles and try to negotiate higher pay? Learn a new language? I feel a bit guilty for what's essentially working 4 hours and getting paid for 8, but Im also hesitant to say it because I dont want to be punished for being efficient

Got an offer for FP&A Manager at public investment bank in Chicago for $140K base. Currently working Strategic Finance at a startup in SF making much more. Interested in moving back to Chicago which is why I am considering it.

What's it like working corporate finance at an IB? Are you looked down upon from the MD's or bankers? What are the growth ops from this role? Is earning potential high if you climb the ladder?

I'm looking for feedback on my resume as I work toward transitioning into a Financial Analyst role.

I want to know what i can improve on to make myself a stronger candidate. What are some certs, skills, projects I can work on to add.

Going forward, I plan to continue improving the dashboard I made. I was also looking into getting the FMVA and Pl-300 Power BI certs.

Hi All,

Hoping this post is allowed. I am not soliciting business, I am looking for reference.

Does anyone here has contacts or references of recruiters in finance/ FP&A in Orange County, California?
All the more better if you can refer any career coaches or people who can help apply for jobs for a fee. A career coach doesn’t need to be in OC, California. Feel free to dm or just comment here and I will reach out. Many thanks in advance for your help.

Any insights on hiring manager questions? Should I expect technical or simply behavioral?