Hire the Top 3% of Freelance FP&A Managers

Business Leaders Seek the Help of FP&A Consultants Amid Economic Volatility

The primary mandate for financial planning and analysis is to link corporate strategy to execution and financial results, thereby improving management’s ability to influence performance positively. Business owners need FP&A experts to analyze financial data and performance, develop and track key performance indicators (KPIs), and provide insights and support for business decisions.

In fact, according to a 2022 McKinsey & Company article citing proprietary data, companies are spending 10% more on FP&A activities now than they did 10 years ago. The article suggests that increasing economic volatility, which necessitates FP&A reports in real time, rather than just annually or quarterly, and the proliferation of data that can play into analyses may be reasons why the demand for FP&A expertise is growing.

Although there can be multiple definitions for many finance and accounting roles, the common scope of an FP&A function or job is to assess and help ensure the general financial health of a company through four focus areas:

1. Planning and budgeting – This involves creating a framework to help a company reach its financial goals in the long term and on a monthly basis.
2. Integrated financial planning – This involves developing a comprehensive plan that includes all aspects of your business’s finances across all divisions.
3. Management and performance reporting – This involves evaluating and effectively communicating to stakeholders how well your business is doing, including tracking KPIs.
4. Modeling and forecasting – This involves generating a comprehensive view: Financial modeling helps you see your company’s performance in the past and present; forecasting looks at the expectation of future performance.

Financial planning and analysis is not a job for inexperienced accountants or even seasoned accountants who only have a background in general management. FP&A can be extremely complex, requiring the consultant to obtain information and cooperation from many business units, get buy-in from multiple stakeholders with various objectives, and navigate the nuances of different organizations. Small and medium-sized businesses that don’t have in-house FP&A expertise will often hire an external FP&A consultant through a specialized financial service provider or as an independent contractor.

This hiring guide offers insights into how to hire the best FP&A consultant for your particular needs.

What attributes distinguish quality FP&A Consultants from others?

The person you hire must be someone you can trust to provide accurate financial analyses, effective reports, and advice that adds value to your business. Prioritize experience. A high-quality candidate will have at least five years of general FP&A experience. Typically, top FP&A consultants have worked in all four FP&A focus areas and are able to determine the methods and data sources to deliver accurate, insightful, and actionable analyses.

In addition, the best-qualified FP&A experts have worked directly with executive management teams, delivered board reports, and driven business decisions and results through their analyses.

And finally, top FP&A consultants are not only skilled and knowledgeable from a technical financial perspective, but also creative, adaptable, and adept at working with diverse stakeholders, processes, and financial systems.

How can you identify the ideal FP&A Consultant for you?

Accurate and actionable FP&A is a crucial driver of business performance and success, so your ideal consultant has to be able to help you make some of your most important business decisions.

Common tasks for which a company decides to hire an FP&A consultant include:

• Assisting with capital budgeting.
• Performing variance analysis (budgets and forecasts versus actuals).
• Developing compensation plans.
• Working with turnaround situations.
• Assessing the financial impact of strategic business initiatives.
• Evaluating the viability of new products and markets.

Given the strategic importance of these tasks, it’s wise to opt for a senior-level expert with experience that’s relevant to your situation. In addition, to find the right FP&A consultant for your needs, look for these important skills:

• Financial analysis – Performing in-depth financial planning and analysis demands strong skills in selecting, analyzing, and working with financial data.
• Financial reporting – FP&A requires the ability to use various input and output accounting software and data sources to create well-organized and intuitive reports, analyze the data, and present the findings. Most FP&A professionals are expert Microsoft Excel users.
• Financial modeling and financial forecasting – All qualified FP&A professionals should be experts at financial modeling and forecasting. Typically, this will also incorporate robust budgeting skills and experience.
• Financial management – Higher-level financial managers can provide an extra level of sophistication to FP&A activities by digging deeper into key metrics and company performance.

Depending on your business’s use case, you may also want to look for these complementary skills:

• Management consulting – Since FP&A involves helping organizations reach their goals, management consulting experience can enable an FP&A expert to add extra business value from a broader perspective. For instance, such experience would be of interest to a client who wants a more sophisticated financial analysis of the health of their business.
• Business plan consulting – Some consultants specialize in business plan consulting, which may include assisting with market and product research and pricing. This background can be especially useful for FP&A feasibility and viability reports.
• Industry analysis – Industry analysts create and analyze reports covering updates and performance of specific industries, sectors, and companies. This expertise can add value to your FP&A project, including the identification of key metrics.
• FP&A management – Many larger organizations have dedicated FP&A teams and business unit leaders. Having this kind of background can elevate the consultant’s ability to add value.

In addition to these technical skills, strong communication, presentation, and problem-solving skills enable FP&A consultants to present findings and recommendations to clients and help them navigate complex business situations.

How to Write an FP&A Consultant Job Description for Your Project

Start by clearly describing your business sector and project, including any relevant strategic initiatives or other reasons why you’re hiring an FP&A consultant at this time. Clearly articulating your needs improves chances that suitable candidates will apply for the opportunity. Be as specific as you can about what you want to accomplish, and clearly state your expectations in terms of the qualifications and experience you’re looking for.

Also, it’s never too soon to engage stakeholders and compile the information and sources relevant to the engagement. Even if you aren’t sure about the full scope yet, getting a head start will help the analysis move forward more quickly. If you can begin these preparatory steps before you need to write the job description, it may be helpful to include information about what you have done already and/or plan to do before the consultant starts.

What are the most important FP&A Consultant interview questions?

In addition to possessing experience and rigorous analytical skills, a qualified FP&A consultant must also communicate, collaborate, and build trust with you and others. During the interview, you’ll want to see the candidate demonstrate these soft skills as they answer the following questions:

How would you approach this particular budgeting and planning exercise based on what you know so far?

Budgeting and planning is one of the most important ways for companies to analyze and manage current and future financial performance. Ask what approach the candidate would use to meet your specific business needs in this area. Do their answers make sense to you based on your experience of the company? If not, ask the candidate to explain their reasoning.

Describe your experience working on financial forecasts.

A good candidate should be able to describe a recent financial forecast they developed. Ask how they approached the situation, arrived at their assumptions, and handled nuances and complications. Ideally, their example will be recent and relevant.

Describe your approach to integrated financial planning.

Expect a good candidate to talk about how they would leverage your financial data and provide additional analytical value by integrating other components, such as dequity, free cash flow, and payment terms.

Walk me through an example of management and performance reporting you’ve done.

The candidate should provide you with a detailed explanation of how their FP&A outputs have been used for management and performance reporting. This can be especially useful for executive incentive compensation and capital budgeting exercises.

What steps do you follow in your workflow?

No two financial FP&A projects are exactly the same, and consultants’ practices may vary somewhat; nevertheless, a typical workflow includes the following steps:

Step 1: Define objectives and stakeholders.

• Discuss the specific reason an FP&A consultant is needed; for instance, to raise capital or forecast business economics and KPIs.
• Determine what methods and data sources will meet the FP&A and stakeholder objectives.

Step 2: Gather data.

• Compile information about the business, including relevant business operations overviews and other business-specific particulars that are relevant to the use case.
• Aggregate existing business financials and develop a preliminary financial forecast and/or financial model.
• Sensitize and make adjustments to the financial data, as necessary, collaborating with business partners to stay on track.
• Identify and calibrate forecast or analytical drivers, assumptions, and sensitivities, as relevant, to make the forecast more robust and insightful for specific use cases.
• Ensure that the design, inputs, outputs, and summaries are easy to use and presentable for all stakeholders.

Step 3: Conduct additional research and analysis, as needed.

• Perform in-depth analysis of relevant company data, industry-specific best practices, or standard performance metrics to enhance the FP&A outputs, as relevant.

Step 4: Present findings and iterate/collaborate with management, as needed.

• Prepare and deliver a comprehensive presentation of the FP&A outputs and run additional modules, as relevant.

Step 5: Finalize the FP&A deliverables and decide on next steps.

• Ensure that the deliverables have satisfactorily met all the needs of management and decide whether the analysis needs to be maintained and periodically updated.
• Make a plan for any future work.

Why do companies hire FP&A Consultants?

An FP&A consultant is a financial professional who has experience designing and building robust, strategic financial analyses to achieve or support specific business initiatives and outcomes. FP&A experts perform scenario modeling, assess potential outcomes and risks associated with different options, identify KPIs and financial metrics to measure progress and performance of strategic decisions, and collaborate with other departments to align business goals with overall financial objectives.

There are many reasons your company might need a thorough, accurate, and actionable financial analysis and/or plan, including when you’re planning capital budgeting projects and profitability, analyzing KPIs, or improving understanding of business units and sensitivities. For any of these use cases, hiring a qualified FP&A consultant will help you gain a deeper understanding of your company’s financial performance and provide important information for management’s business decisions. Hiring the right FP&A consultant will ensure that you’ll derive meaningful value for your business from the engagement.