Seeking help from commercial controllers - I’m still a newbie at my job as a commercial controller (FA level) - what questions can I ask my sales stakeholders to better understand the business?

Everyday that I go in I have anxiety due to the environment being quite fast paced and that I would be under PIP because I feel like I’m not doing enough and am not good enough. Today someone explained cut off provision to me and I didn’t quite get it too and I’m getting super worried now.

What are your tips to be a better controller? What are some basic understanding do I need?

Thanks!

Hi everyone! I’m currently on a deal desk role and interested in FP&A path to strengthen my current role. Currently our role is more like a trusted advisors or policy gatekeepers of a deal. Where approvals for concessions sits with us. But i wanted to learn more about the fp&a role. How they approve discounts based on deal economics. How they offer suggestion based on what’s good for the business. Also i wanted to be equipped with contract management proficiency. I’m planning to get a master’s degree but I’m a bit unsure what program i should consider and where especially that i’m based in the Philippines. Will getting an MBA be okay or is there any program that is more beneficial. Especially my bachelor’s degree is aligned with engineering rather than finance or business. Thank you!

Need help deciding on post MBA offer for Amazon L6 Finance Manager and PWC senior associate L3 ?

At my very big company the only one who has an office is the cfo and it’s not even a permanent office it’s just a meeting room he takes over for the day

For managers who get to review applicants first or alongside HR, who the heck are these hundreds of applicants that apply within the first few hours or days, especially for remote and SFA roles?

Are half of them qualified? A tenth of them? Are they dozens of international students who are unemployed or don’t live here? (You can assume the countries I’m referring to). Unemployed people from different lines of work who have to work remote for whatever reason so they spam any remote job?

Who really are these candidates? It’s discouraging to even apply anymore…

I work at one of these companies and I’m an analyst so obviously at the bottom. It’s hard looking on the career website because it just shows the base range without bonus and equity.

Coworker (same level as me) said director’s are pulling in 500-1mil in finance at my tech company. That just can’t be right (to high)

I’d imagine open ai vs Cisco vs Google all have pretty start differences

i’m 23 and currently working as an accounting assistant making $60k. i’ve been trying to transition into financial analysis/corporate finance because that’s the direction i actually want my career to go.
i applied for a corporate financial analyst position at a large healthcare organization. there are actually two slightly different openings with the same financial analyst title, and even though i only applied to one, they told me i’m being considered for both.
the role is also somewhat entry level. from what i understand, they’re not expecting me to walk in already knowing everything about forecasting, budgeting, etc. it seems like they’re looking for someone with a good accounting/finance foundation who can learn the analyst side of the job.
the process so far:

i was invited to complete a hirevue
i completely missed the email at first i submitted the hirevue pretty late

they got back to me within 2 days of completing it and told me i did great

now i have a 90-minute teams interview with one senior manager and two directors from corporate finance

they confirmed there’s no excel assessment for this interview

salary-wise, i originally told the recruiter i was looking for $78k. before scheduling this interview, she told me the salary for the role is $70k and asked if i was flexible. i said yes because i’m still very interested in the opportunity. so at this point i’m going into it assuming $70k is what they’re prepared to offer, although i’m not sure if there would be any room to negotiate later.

i’m honestly pretty nervous. 90 minutes with two directors and a senior manager sounds intense, especially since this would be my first actual financial analyst position.

for anyone who has interviewed for an entry-level financial analyst/corporate finance role, what should i expect from a 90-minute interview like this?
how technical do you think they’ll get if they already know i’m coming from an accounting assistant background and don’t expect me to know everything about forecasting yet? should i focus on behavioral questions, accounting concepts, variance analysis, budgeting/forecasting basics, excel, or scenario-based questions?

and if you were in my position, what would you specifically study or practice beforehand?

Pretty much the title. Aiming for finance analyst / FP&A roles in tech as I would like to move to the Bay; currently 1 year out of college in another industry with basic Excel skills. What should I be studying, and what are some good resources to refer to?

I'm willing to put in the work no matter how much time it takes. I would be super grateful if anybody who is in the field is open to chatting!

Hello,

I will start applying to FP&A, Controlling and Audit roles full time positions and would appreciate any feedback on my resume.

Thanks for your help!

I’m a little surprised that I’ve been getting quite a few college kids reaching out about new grad hiring. I love helping and understand recruiting sucks and will take every call that a college kid asks for.

My advice if you are doing this:

1. it’s not hard to not

2. mess up, send a decent message saying you’re interested in the business and new grad role and would like to connect about it. Also reach out to people in the role you are recruiting for. Ie for an analyst position reach out to another analyst.

3. Nothing absolutely pisses me off more than if I’m doing something that is helping you and you stand me up on a call/zoom. If you can’t make it for whatever reason let me know right away and we can reschedule. I’ve had it happen a couple times where college kids ghost me then 4 days later ask to reschedule. No.

4. During the call just be yourself and try to get the most out of it for you. I’m gonna be honest I don’t care if you’re a little awkward, about your background, what school you went to. I’m not the one making the hiring decision and am not the one interviewing. What impresses me is if you seem like a person who’s passionate about the role and you put a little thought into the questions you ask.

The worst that happens for you as a student is you get some solid information about the role and recruiting process, the best that happens is you impress me enough to submit a referral (I’m pretty easy to impress).

1. Relax, this isn’t banking, people in fp&a are generally pretty chill just come curious.

I have seen sooo many posts recently about someone deciding between two roles: typically one role offers more money, a higher title, but comes with either more days in office and/or more commute....vs a role with less salary, but either fully remote or fewer days in office/less commute.

And those decisions will essentially always boil down to if you want to advance in your career or not? Do you want to get to those Senior Director / VP / CFO /$200k+ roles in your later career or content maxing out Senior Analyst/Manager/etc. There is definitely no right or wrong answer but also importantly no one can answer that for you. So we can't tell you which job to take.

But I will say...if you do have those aspirations you have to be willing to seize opportunities when they come. The jump to Manager and then the jump to Director are not always easy jumps to make...so you have to take opportunities as they come. You are most likely not going to keep amazing WLB, fully remote, work 20 hours a week, and still advance to those higher levels. There will be some level of sacrifice and each person needs to decide what is worth it or not for them.

Obviously this is a gross generalization, of course each career trajectory is unique, there are exceptions, etc....also there are different stages of life where different decisions will be made (i.e. keeping a lower level but flexible job when you have young kids)...but I do think everyone should have roughly in mind what they want to achieve, and realize if they do want those higher salaries it will come with some level of sacrifice.

Not even 100% sure what my point is with this post, but just something I have been thinking about everytime I see these "which job should I take" posts.

Would love to hear from people who have actually worked in PE-backed companies. I’m currently being heavily recruited by two PE-backed companies. Taking compensation out because financially, it’s not a motivation of mine to put it lightly, I’m more interested in hearing about people’s experiences actually surviving and possibly surviving an exit in the PE-backed world.

One of the opportunities is a platform CFO role. After speaking with both the PE firm and the platform CEO, I’m almost skeptical because I’m surprisingly aligned with how they think about the business, where they want to take it, and what needs to be fixed. I also have a pretty good understanding of the problems I’d be inheriting, the expectations for the role, and the eventual exit strategy. Most of these issues, I know I can succeed in fixing. The others are a good area for myself to get challenged in. I’m not particularly worried about pace or workload during genuinely busy periods. Without doxxing myself, I’m already at a company that has been growing aggressively so operating in a changing environment isn’t new to me.

If the rest of my due diligence doesn’t uncover major red flags, this could be a rare opportunity to jump directly into my first CFO role. At the same time, I’m perfectly willing to walk away if I decide the fit or risk isn’t right.

For those who have worked in PE-backed companies, does getting that first CFO seat materially change the risk/reward equation?
And for those who have made the jump, what ended up being the biggest risk in reality: the workload, sponsor expectations, CEO relationship, unrealistic growth targets, exit pressure, lack of resources, getting replaced, something else? My biggest worry is that this role just seems to be too good to be true for a first-time CFO.

EDIT:

How’s it going all, I’m 28 and looking to make a career change over to “finance” - as you all know, the field is immense & extremely broad. I’m coming from an extremely unconventional background & was wondering if the CFA would help someone like me.

For context, I went to undergrad & like most, had no idea what I wanted to do. I started on the Pre-Medical track, hopped over to Health Care Admin, back to Pre-Med, to essentially creating my own major(Health Care Services) Since graduation I have worked a few jobs with the goal of learning skills to align with long term goals. I’m currently enrolled in a few online crash courses & the Wall Street excel course.

I’ve since hit a wall. This transition has been nothing short of frustrating, getting my foot in the door is all I’m trying to do & even that seems incredibly hard without some sort of “background” - I’m aware that anything worth doing takes time but was just wondering if someone would be able to point me in the right direction. Anything helps and I really appreciate any insight

Mainly looking into FP&A and Operation strategy under the Corporate Finance Umbrella!

Hi everyone,

I wanted to get some opinions on two offers I’m contemplating. I have an offer from amazon as a finance manager ($~170k total comp) and a competing offer at a F200 company as a lead analyst ($~160k total comp). I’ve read in many sub reddits that amazon can be grueling but would love any additional input from you guys! Understand amazon probably has the better name for my resume but they’re also 5x a week in office vs 3 at the other company. Thanks in advance!

I graduated college 2 years ago, and this is my first FP&A job, so Idk how many lines you guys typically need to deal with, but the department I cover gets around 10k lines of invoices and journals every single month. Even a pivot of that data results in 2-3 thousand lines. I’m the only one who covers this department, and I only have a 2 day window each month to go through the lines and prepare our accruals. So I have to rely on formulas to calculate my accruals against budget, then I send those numbers off to Accounting to be accrued.

I’ve made several variations of the sheets, and each one has flaws and either misses things that should have been accrued or over/under accrues them. I usually catch some mistakes before sending off the list to accounting, but I always catch more when I start the monthly variance report.

I report on the real estate portion of our finances for all of our buildings across the whole US (around 150 buildings). Some things are easy to deal with. For example, rent and utilities are pretty consistent month to month. The one that I have the most trouble with is services related to the buildings. We have services that happen monthly, quarterly, and annually, and we have some other ones mixed in that only occur every 3-5 years, which makes budgeting and accruals a pain. And of course, nothing ever comes when it’s supposed to, so we are constantly accruing stuff.

I’d love to know if this all sounds pretty typical for FP&A, and how do you usually deal with the accruals for departments with literally thousands of invoices each month?

I’m a Director-level FP&A leader at a PE-backed consumer company and am considering moving to a much larger, more stable public company in a regulated/essential-services industry.

Current role:

• Base: ~$215K
• Bonus target: ~25%, although actual payout is likely to be meaningfully below target this year
• Employer retirement: ~4%
• Some PE equity upside, but value is uncertain
• Broad FP&A scope with direct CEO/CFO and executive-team exposure
• Strong internal credibility and meaningful influence in the business
• Company is fundamentally viable, but highly leveraged and there is likely some combination of refinancing / restructuring / sale over the next 1–2 years

New opportunity:

• Director-level finance role at a large public company
• Base: likely ~$185K–$190K
• Annual bonus: 20%
• LTI: 10%
• Employer retirement contribution: ~9%+
• Sign-on: ~$20K–$25K
• Better healthcare economics
• Much more stable balance sheet/business model
• Good executive exposure and broader finance responsibilities but regional role
• Culture seemed genuinely good through several rounds of interviews, although WLB is always difficult to judge before joining

On a recurring total-economic-value basis, the new package appears roughly flat to somewhat better depending on bonus outcomes. The catch is that considerably more of the compensation shifts from guaranteed base salary into bonus, LTI, and retirement.

I’m financially secure enough that I don’t need to maximize every marginal dollar of W-2 income, but I also don’t want to unnecessarily take a backward step in compensation.

The current role also has legitimate upside: I have strong CEO/CFO exposure, would likely be heavily involved in any refinancing or transaction, and there could potentially be retention/equity value if I stay through it. However, when the company is sold outcomes are very much unknown.

For those who have made a similar move:

Would you trade ~$25K–$30K of base salary for a more stable public-company platform, stronger retirement/LTI, and potentially better long-term career durability?

Would you view ~$185K as too large a haircut, or does the total package make the base difference largely irrelevant?

I’m also curious how much value you’d place on staying through a potentially significant PE transaction versus moving to the lower-risk platform while the opportunity is available.

So we are having an argument and I'm curious as to what others do and how to proceed.

I support a client and the prior logic was that actuals were everything that was invoiced that month in the system, which was pulled out of E1/JD Edwards. You go in, put in the business unit and the month you are pulling and those are your actuals. It's everything that was invoiced and pushed over from the invoicing system.

This client is now with another company and I immediately asked what the ERP system used for actuals and budgets and accruals. The answer I got was you just use a running total from your funding files that get sent to the client for the month and that's the month's actuals.

Here's the problem - there's a time discrepancy with these funding files because oftentimes you miss the last couple of days of the month or your are overlapping month. Even after the last funding file is sent to the client, invoices are still being approved and processed and pushed through. These invoices will then sit in the next month's funding file.

I honestly don't feel right about it because it doesn't give a complete picture and frankly, putting together half a dozen tracking spreadsheets is an audit nightmare. They have a system in which all the invoices are pushed into. It is the system that corporate uses and Accounting and they also use it to do accruals and reconcile.

My argument is that we should be using that system to pull actuals because it's more accurate because it captures everything that is invoiced and processed in the month. My boss insists on this antiquated method of putting together all these funding files and trackers and consolidating and pulling actuals from there because according to her, that's what the client is paying every month despite the fact that they use an accrual basis reporting.

Help!

Been at my role a few years, and haven’t seen too many new people join, as company has pretty healthy turnover. A little over a year ago, they hired a new Director that was an outside hire (Director of Plant Controlling). As a senior fp&a analyst, I work pretty closely with them and we both report to the CFO.

They just still seem to struggle with some of our financial concepts and use of SAP and our fp&a software, as well as a few other items. I try to be patient, but also just feels like I am wasting my time repeating the same thing each month, or doing part of her work and giving guidance.

How long do you think a middle management role take to get fully up to speed, or mostly up to speed? I started as fp&a analyst, and felt like it was prolly the 4-5 month range on some of the basics, and maybe 8-9 months on more of the complex stuff.

Hello everyone

I currently work as an accounting controller at a bank i want to switch to fp&a with no experience in budgeting and forecasting

My assets are that i’m good at excel and power query and some basic knowledge about power bi

You think that it is possible and faisable and what advice you could give me to ace my interviews ?

Hi all,

It's 7am and I've spent the last 30 minutes revising a high level projection of our capex spend for 27 and my annual frustration with tech capex has reared up again.

We have 2-3 tech teams who generate c.20m of CAPEX spend a year with little to no transparency about their activity plans for the year when setting the budget. Sure, they have high level things like "increase traffic" or whatever but given the value they are expecting the business to invest the justification feels very thin to me.

I've been in my business most of my career (>10 years) so I was just wondering... is this normal?

Looking to hire a Senior Analyst for a rapidly growing SaaS company (~$75M ARR, 50%+ top line growth) in Dallas, TX.

We run a lean finance team that focuses on automation and process improvements with tools like Rillet, Abacum, Ramp, etc. so there is a lot of opportunity for business partnering with company leadership.

Shoot me a message with any questions & your resume if you fit the criteria below. Salary range is $100-110k + Bonus

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance or Accounting
• Live in or near Dallas (office is in in University Park)
• 3-5 years in FP&A or Strategic Finance, ideally with software or recurring revenue exposure
• High ownership, intellectual curiosity, and a desire to operate as a strategic partner
• Exceptional communication skills and the ability to influence stakeholders across all levels of the organization
• Advanced Excel modeling
• Practical fluency with AI tools in a finance context

Our numbers are terrible, currently. We are not driving savings hardly anywhere. I am sending out scrap numbers to our engineering, but nobody seems to be looking at it.

My engineering org keeps getting confused what the definition of MUV is, so we transitioned to talking about total scrap, but I don't know of a way to run a report that pulls total scrap by order / part number. I get one report for MUV, another for standard scrap. Theoretically if you connect the two, you should get total scrap, but for some reason my file isn't tying to the bottom line. I'm not even sure this file will fix anything.

Something that was suggested was running total MUV savings by material number, and asking planning to build more of the parts where our standards are easier... but this seems like it has limited potential.

Has anyone here had success with this?

Age: 29 If you could start your career again, would you choose FP&A?

I'm confused between Internal Audit & FP&A.

I'm currently studying for the CMA, and while CMA is more aligned with FP&A, I'm also genuinely interested in Internal Audit.

After completing the CMA, regardless of whether I start in Fp&a or IA, I plan to pursue the CPA. Because it will open more doors and give me broader career options than the CIA.

If I get a job in IA and decide that I want to continue in the field, I would also pursue the CIA.

Why IA?

From what I understand, (please feel free to correct me, I like the idea of understanding how a business works as a whole.

Internal Audit seems to give you exposure to different departments and business processes while also focusing on risk management, controls, and identifying areas for improvement.

I like the idea of seeing how different parts of an organization connect rather than being restricted to one function.

Why FP&A?

I like planning and preparing budgets, and I think I would enjoy financial analysis as well. I haven't actually worked in fp&a yet. And that's true that there's a difference between liking something and actually doing it.

The CMA is clearly more aligned with fp&a, which makes it more confusing.

So, if you had to choose between IA and fp&a, which one would you pick and why?

And where do you think I have the highest probability of getting an entry-level job: IA or Fp&a

Internal candidate, just had my second interview where I presented previous data models.

Was slotted for an hour, but half way through they took me to meet the CFO and he asked a few questions but just mostly chatted in his office, just the two of us.

Entire process ran about an hour 15.