I am looking to break into Senior FP&A role in a F500, specifically in the tech industry. I spent 4 years in Big4, reaching Senior Associate level, and have my CPA. Ideally, I am looking for FP&A roles that do not simply support the accounting division with monthly closes, reconciliations, etc, but spent most of the time in budgeting, planning, forecasting, and working with the M&A guys on strategy / analysis of business units / revenue streams. Ultimately I would want to transition into BizDev, Corporate Strategy.
Afew Questions:
1.WIthout having an MBA, would this be the best path to take to add to my skill set and transition to BizDev, Corporate Strategy assuming I would do very well?
2. Having said this, do I need to know any type of financial modeling to be competitive in the interview process for the type of FP&A roles I'm looking for? This would include building P&L/BS/CF/ models with all the assumptions from scratch, performing any type of DCF analysis and so on.
3. At the minimum, would I need to be know enough about modeling to be able to talk about it? If so, what are the key topics to brush up on?
Would appreciate any insight.
I know this was originally posted over a year ago, but I'm wondering if the community has any thoughts on this. This question is something I've been wondering about myself for awhile.
What are your specific questions? I'm happy to help, just not sure what you're looking for.
I went Big 4--> F500 FP&A and had an opportunity to go to Bus Dev, but instead chose to take another role within Corp Fin at the F500.
Thanks for the response. At this point in time, the path you took is exactly what I'm looking to get into.
Can you shed some light into how difficult/easy it was to get into FP&A coming out of Big4?
Also, that's awesome that you had the chance to move into Bus Dev; was your Fp&A position more focused on planning/forecasting/decision support in regards to strategy, or was it more a supporting role for the accounting teams?
Lastly, did you work with recruiters for the FP&A role you landed?
Check out the Corporate Corral, there's a lot of info on CD there.
@"HashtagCorpDev"
I should probably clarify a bit more. I'd personally like to transition from big 4 to an fp&a role (not glorified accounting/reporting) in a few years, and i'm wondering how transferrable the skills really are. I've also got my eye on doing an MBA in a few years as well, with the end career goal being vp/director/possibly CFO. I guess my interest lies more in the first half of the question and less in the Corp Dev. I know there's not really a question buried in there, just wanted to get people's thoughts.
Accountingbyday, i'd actually be really interested in hearing about your position and how you made the switch. I'll take as much info as you're willing to share. Feel free to PM me if you'd prefer.
FP&A will often have a decent amount of reporting and probably some accounting. This is one reason why Big 4 transfers into these roles so well.
I'm not telling you to change your goals, but just know that Director is pretty reasonable, VP is pretty difficult and requires some luck and CFO (at major companies) is EXTREMELY difficult and requires luck.
I don't know what you want to know, but my experience at my F500 is basically: SFA role in a commercial team -> Finance Mgr of an operations team -> Finance Mgr of a top BU
After my initial SFA role I could have gone into BD as an SFA, but I wanted the promotion so I didnt take it. Then, before my latest role the VP in charge of BD reached out to me and strongly hinted that I had a chance at the role if I'd wait for it to open. I chose not to wait because I really wanted to get the experience in my current BU (it's arguably our top BU) and I'm doing a lot of global strategy, some BD support and other work I find pretty interesting.
Hope that helps, let me know if you have specific questions.
If you have any specific questions about big 4 to CF ect.. I'm happy to answer if I can. My background: Associate- 2 years big 4 Audit, Pharma and venture capital industry group Senior Associate - 1.5 years TS at same big 4, mostly Chemical/Healthcare and srvice industry deals Manager - F100 (Pharma industry) 1 year as Sales Forecasting mgr on Financial Decision Support team (strategic finance). Never seen a debit/credit or accounting entry in this role. Take no part on monthly or quarterly "closes" other than updating a competitor/market view for a highlighted brand. No link to "close"activities accountants perform
Do you mind specifying which group you were in within TS? i.e. Valuation, Due Diligence.
I worked in Financial Due Diligence. Did one valuations project and wasn't impressed. Those guys are technically doing "Finance" work, but for financial reporting purposes. FDD is more accounting oriented, but for strategic & Acquisition/operational reasons. I liked it because it's one of the few chances you have at Big 4 to actually add monetary value from you're consulting. Every other service the big 4 provides is simply a cost to clients (financial reporting), and never results in improving their bottom line.
Interesting to hear that. I have been going back and forth between going straight into a FP&A position, or getting some experience in FDD before. Do you think the work you did in those 1.5 years in FDD added skills/experiences that were seen favorably when you were interviewing for Forecasting Manager? Specially - selling points you wouldn't have had if you were interviewing straight out of audit?
It's an interesting question because in my case, the most transferable skillsets for my current job were gained in Audit. However, I think I'm the exception as the reason behind it all was the industry skillset over Pharma that I developed auditing giant pharma companies and blind luck. I just happened to work on audit areas that are less accounting and more analytical but specific to the industry. That being said, the general skills I developed in TS are more transferable because TS work is far more analytical than audit. As far as how my employer percieved all of this, my boss was much more interested in my TS work and barely touched on the audit stuff, despite the fact that the audit background transfered perfectly in my case. But TS looks a lot sexier and really bridges accounting and finance nicely. A good place to spend a year or two, longer can result in pigeon holing worse than audit (let me know if you want me to eleborate). And it's nice to have some M&A experience on the resume, always have the option of working my way into Bus/Corp Development, but without the TS experience it would be a feasible but difficult move. I would give it a strong look before moving on, you really never know what your getting into when you sign on for an FP&A job. I have counterparts in other groups who's job desciption sounds like typical FP&A but their jobs really suck, not as much as auditing but not what any of us wants to be doing.
Please do!
Currently 1.5 years into audit (big 4) and am putting the wheels in motion to transfer to one of our TS groups. I assume I'm naturally going to be herded into our FDD-ish group, which although maybe not the sexiest option, anything beats audit, right? I've heard that we do rotations within the TS groups (not between audit and TS like some Big 4), which sounds like the ideal situation for sticking around a year or so.
If you could've picked any TS group (excluding the Corp Fin/IBD, clearly) to focus on, which would be? I realize this is going to vary depending on the firm, since each structure TS/TAS differently.
At my firm we has TS Financial Due Diligence, TS Valuations, and TS Capital Markets Accounting Advisory Services CMAAS. CMAAS is technical accounting. Valuations, as I mentioned, is mostly valueing intangible assets for financial reporting purposes. Of the three FDD is actually the sexiest, at least at my firm. I got sucked into a 2 month CMAAS project and hated it. Worked on a tiny bit of valuation work and it was ok. By pure luck, I ended up on a 4 month deal as a revenue forecast modeler. This is extremely rare for FDD, purely economic & finance work, and helped my resume out because of direct revenue forecasting experience, which TS-FDD typically won't get.
As far as getting pigeon holed, it's actually really simple. You won't find a single person in TS who would accept a financial reporting exit op. The skillset you gain in TS is very specific. The longer you stay in TS, the more you gain due diligence experience. Most of the Director and manager level guys i saw leave left for other due diligence jobs. Senior Associates pulled off better exit ops because they are leaving for lower level jobs in finance (PE, CD, Hedge funds). You can't go from TS director to Director of Corporate Development at F500. Same applies for PE. If MBA is possible, the TS experience will help you land a banking gig, or maybe MM PE or CD if your lucky.
Great thread that I'd like to kick back up again. I have a specific question for my current situation:
I had ~2.5yrs Big 4 audit experience and then left for a corporate accounting role in the healthcare technology industry. The company is public but still small enough that I would up splitting time about 50/50 doing corporate accounting and FP&A, Reporting, and analytic type work. This includes revenue forecasting and working to identify and report on key KPI's. I recently received a job offer from Big 4 to enter their TAS FDD group at a level 3 senior associate. My boss at my current job informed me that both of our roles will be transitioning into a pure FP&A function over the next year. I am also currently studying for the GMAT and will be taking the exam before fall; i plan to get an MBA in fall 2016.
This puts me in a tough situation. My end goal would be to work in PE or Corporate development related specifically to the tech industry after getting my MBA (from a good school).
Questions:
What looks better to Top MBA admissions? The M&A FDD experience or going from corporate acct into a FP&A role at my current job? The company public and a real player in their market space, but not a huge name brand like IBM or something.
What would be better for my end goal of PE or Corp Dev?
Also, can anyone with FDD experience at Big 4 shed some light on the more accounting and more finance related work in the job? Are you evaluating assumptions in the financial forecasts of target companies? Do you get exposure to the financial modeling at all or are you just basically just an auditor who audits balances and values that are crucial to the target company's valuation?
Bumping this thread because I want answers to these questions
Currently in FDD at a Big 4. The core analysis in a buy side due diligence report are 3 sections:
Underlying earnings - We assist in adjusting EBITDA to a "normalised" EBITDA for use in a multiples valuation. This is usually the lengthiest part of the report as not only is the normalised EBITDA essential in the valuation the target, it also breaks down the normalised profitability of the target going forward.
Working capital - Part of price adjustment mechanism during completion - We assist clients in identifying what a "standard" level of working capital may look like at completion of sale so they can try to negotiate the sales terms to target this amount of working capital to be delivered by the vendor. Any shortfalls represents a discount and any surplus is a premium adjustment.
Net debt - Most transactions are done on a cash free, debt free basis so we help identify what should be considered debt or debt-like and hence adjusted out of the purchase price.
There are other tidbits that we do but these three form the core analysis in a standard buy side DD report.
Great insight. Do you work on clients primarily in one specific industry or do you do work on clients in a wide spectrum of industries? Also--do you mind sharing your post TS goals (e.g. stay in TS, MBA, Corp Strat, etc).
Also curious about this.
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