CEOs, CFOs, and executive leadership teams rely heavily on corporate FP&A to make decisions.
FREMONT, CA: CFOs, CEOs and the Board of Directors rely on financial planning and analysis teams to assist them in making major corporate decisions.
Exceptionally few companies can be profitable and grow consistently without careful financial planning and cash flow management. Typically, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and the FP&A team manage a corporation's cash flow.
Financial planning and financial analysts use quantitative and qualitative analysis of all operational aspects to evaluate a company's progress toward achieving its goals and to plan for the future. The goal of an FP&A Analyst is to forecast financial performance by considering economic and business trends, reviewing past performance, and anticipating obstacles and potential difficulties.
The Best Way to Decide if FP&A Work is Right for You: Individuals who are good financial analysts can handle and intelligently analyze a wide variety of data. Problem-solving skills are a strength of financial analysts. To formulate various possible growth scenarios, they decipher the various puzzle pieces that make up a company's finances. Math or spreadsheets such as Excel may not be your cup of tea, so you should consider an alternative career path.
A career as a corporate financial analyst may be a good fit for you if you are a creative problem solver with an aptitude for financial analysis, modeling, and forecasting.
Decision-Making and Learning Skills: Financial analysts need to be able to make firm decisions, avoiding being paralyzed by a vast array of financial choices while evaluating multiple complex options and scenarios.
Financial analysts should strive to learn new things constantly. In the same way businesses, markets, and economies evolve and adapt, analysts must also adapt and change. The business, industry, and economic trends must also be kept in mind while honing financial skills and strategies. Analysts who are at the top of their field learn and improve constantly.
Reading and Analyzing Financial Statements: Professionals in corporate financial planning and analysis are responsible for reading and understanding a company's financial statements, including balance sheets, cash flow statements, income statements, and shareholder equity statements.
By combining assets, liabilities, cash flow, and income, a company's total financial position can be seen as a whole by a good analyst, who understands each financial statement's meaning and implications on its own.
The financial
analysis department should also understand accounting journal entries and financial reconciliation statements as by the accounting department. In order to figure out where the company stands financially and how to move forward from there, analysts have to understand debits and credits and be able to calculate and evaluate key financial ratios.
Project Management Skills: Analysts and planners are both involved in the financial industry. By researching, collecting, and analyzing data, they advise management on how to grow a company's business and profits efficiently.
Financial analysts construct financial projects by preparing financial projections for three and five years. It is common for good financial analysts to possess good project management skills, including leadership, cost and time management, delegation, communication, and overall problem-solving ability.
Most financial analysts typically create and analyze reports using programs like Microsoft Excel. The process of performing corporate financial analysis involves collecting and consolidating a lot of data and then generating many reports with many variables.
