I have a job interview for FP&A and was hoping you guys could help me prepare or at least point me in the right direction. The description mentions the traditional budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis and month end close but I just don’t know what kind of questions or topics will be covered.
Also, do corp fin jobs pay well at entry level? What is work life balance like?
Know the business. Know the KPIs that drive their business. Its entry level though. Show you get NPV, IRR, intermediate accounting and demonstrate your not insane and are willing to work and you’ll be OK. Expect 50 hours a week. Salary dependent on geography. It won’t be great entry level. Its a solid life six to ten years out though.
Fp and a. They are glorified gangsta accountants. Can make 150k after 6-7 years if this is what you consider ballin
GEO,
I appreciate the response. I think that’s a very good idea; the company is in Healthcare and I will get familiar with their business and KPI’s. The job is in New York City and I am very familiar with the NPV, IRR, int acc and finance basics. I tried fruitlessly for years to get into I Banking or Trading but realized it’s corp fin for me. The CFA is losing its value and so are MBA’s. I got my MBA in Finance from a top 50 school and figure that is enough to do corp fin. I don’t think I need a CFA cause at my age it won’t get me too far and might not be worth it.
seems to be true, but in my opinion, i think the CFA is still a little better than your average MBA degree but that’s just my opinion. Corp fin is kinda where i’m hoping to head to as well. Drink the kool-aid if you get in and tell me how it tastes =)
Like they said, you gotta know the company well and what drives its profits. I had one interview for a corporate FP and A job. Before going to my interview, I spent 20 hours researching the company, industry, and publicly-traded competitors.
I showed up to the interview with a 15 page financial analysis and was the first-pick draft out of 150+ applicants.
Whatever company, industry this is for, you should be on glassdoor.com now looking at old interview questions. You should also be able to demonstrate advanced excel skills (pivottables and vlookup bare minimum)
AS for work life balance, I work from 8:30 to 6pm on average without weekends and a generous lunch break. The intensity of a job is driven by the quality of its people and leadership, and I would say the people in corporate finance are generally wannabes. They’re the kind of people who sat the bench on a Division 3 basketball team in college and see Michael Jordan when they look in the mirror after a game.
Corporate finance is the kind of place where you’ve got somewhat intelligent and ambitious people working with you, but don’t think for a second that they’re like you CFAs, Harvard grads, and ibankers that are doing the super serious work.
FP&A is great. you should consider yourself fortunate to have an entry-level opportunity in it. Very rare for entry level stuff in that. It’s usually more of something you have to have 5-10 years experience to get into
Well i had 5-10 years of PWM before going into an entry level FP and A job. It’s hilarious because all the analysts are 21-25 years old and the seniors are 28-29
I’m 33 but look 23
I may fancy myself a return to FP&A one day, but enjoying other corp fin stuff now. But FP&A is good stuff if its the right firm and team.
^ what other corp finance stuff are you doing?
Also, what area of corp finance makes the most money? Treasury?
This is 100% correct.
mlwl - what was in your 15 pg analysis?
15 page analysis? you must have had lot to say about their firm. What was in it?
I’m in treasury related stuff right now. Don’t want to provide much detail sorry. Its a small world out here. All make about the same at the same level. A junior FP&A will make what a junior Treasury guy makes. A manager in FP&A will make what a manager in Treasury makes. Some really unique skills (risk mgmt) or industry background (an engineer) may do better. Treasury is also very broad (LT finance, investor relations, cash mgmt, risk mgmt, insurance, etc.). FP&A basically is what it is. Sometimes the M&A guys are more from the FP&A side, sometimes from treasury side. Depends on business.
How much you pulling in geo?
In line with what’s been suggested here and elsewhere in the forums. I’ve been in the game for nearly a decade, as much as that pains me to say.
The company that I applied to and now work for has a national presence but nobody has ever heard of it because it is …within a subset of hospitality. I don’t care if you guys know who I am, but I don’t want to be able to speak freely and anonymously for othe reasons.
Because the sector is so thinly spread, there’s only 1 publicly traded competitor. I had to write as much about the competitors as what I wrote about the target. My employer had been completing about 1 merger per year and recently went through a recap because they sold out to a Private Equity firm.
What I did was
write general information about the company and the industry that I had figured out through their web site, my interviewer’s comments, and video footage I had found of interviews with executive leadership. I just talked about driving factors such as the economy, weather, minimum wages, unions, government regulation, and a SWOT analysis, their merger history.
I then looked at their competition’s annual reports and financial statements and (CFA level 1 material) did some ratio analysis. I then applied these ratios roughly to the future employer.
I was able to roughly pinpoint how much money the company made (I guessed 200M, the actual amount was 230M), which allowed me to make a rough guess of the company’s FMV. I was told that my estimate was in the ballpark for what the private equity paid for to acquire my employer.
All of my calculations were supported visually in a way that demonstrated an intermediate level of Excel. For example,
A) I linked up some shitty pivot table that was pivotting a table of randomly-generated revenue data,
B) I would show sensitivity analysis to tax rates and break even rates for occupancy.
C) Since I could assume weekend prices and occupancy were different from workday stats, I did some optimum pricing analysis to show how they could maximize profits by changing price and eating.
As you can imagine, the point of the paper wasn’t to show that I had the right answer, but that I was at least using some element of research and logic to arrive the best possible conclusion given limited access to private intel. Without enrolling in the CFA program and spending time on the forum with you guys, I *never* would have gotten this job.