Ciena best Full Time Job Advisor FP & A | 2024 | United States
| Company Name | Ciena |
| Job Role | Advisor FP & A |
| Job Type | Remote Work ( Work from Home ) |
| Location | United States Of America |
| Qualification | Graduate in Relevant Field |
| Experience | freshers And Experienced |
| Batch | 2017 – 2023 |
| Salary | Up To 80 thousands Dollar per Annual (Expected) |
FP&A
Alright, what we’re going to cover today is looking at FP &A versus corporate finance and just kind of defining what those actually look like. We’re going to look at a finance organization, a big organization and a small.
We’re going to talk about what you actually do in FP &A jobs, what types of jobs there are, and go through a quick summary. So let’s dive into it. So FP &A versus corporate finance. So FP &A is actually probably more specifically a part…
of corporate finance. So they’re the group that’s responsible for forecasting, strategy planning, budgeting, reporting, and that is not just financial reporting but operational reporting, operational commercial support, decision making support, and all sorts of different analytics and more.
This is really just a piece of what you might be responsible for. And when you talk about corporate finance, it’s a little broader than FP &A. So it’s going to include
the whole end -to -end finance of a company. That’s going to include things like investor relations, treasury, even things like risk management sometimes. So it’s a much broader definition of which FP &A is just a part.
And we’re going to look in the org chart, and that’s going to help clarify it a little bit. So we talk about FP &A versus corporate finance. The one issue is that FP &A is just a little too narrow. So a lot of jobs are specific to FP &A.
But then as you rise through the ranks, if you’re going to be a site finance leader, a finance director of a business unit or a segment, any of those jobs, they’re not FP &A jobs, but it’s part of the career track that an FP &A person would probably want to be on.
So like I said, it limits more scope and as you go higher in the organization, larger roles require more knowledge, more experience.
Terminology of what a job is called versus what it actually does differs by company and by country. A great example of this is the title of controller. Most people think about this as kind of like an accounting manager or a chief accounting officer,
but in some companies in the US, but more so in Europe, this could actually be a role that owns the end -to -end finance for a division or a business unit or even a company. Controller is just one example.
but it means that when you look at what a role is actually called, you want to look at the content of it. You just don’t want to go by the title. The last bullet here is that the path to CFO requires a lot.
There’s a lot of knowledge you need to become even a business unit CFO, divisional CFO, or the CFO of a company. That means things like accounting, treasury, investor relations. And if you solely focus on FP &A, you’re missing out on some…
Importance of a Broader Skill Set
really important building blocks to get to that CFO role. It doesn’t mean you won’t, but it can make the path a little bit harder. So it’s important to get roles that have some exposure to some of those other elements of corporate finance, not just FP &A.
So I’m going to take you through why I think it’s important to make sure you don’t get completely focused on FP &A and only go down that path. So let’s start with a simple organization. So this is…
what a small company might have where they’ve got a CFO here and then they’ve got an FP &A manager, tax person, controller, chief accounting officer, and then maybe somebody else.
And this is a simple org. But when you get into bigger companies, we’re talking like Fortune 100 companies, maybe super big private companies, but what you’re most likely going to have is some structure like this where you have the CFO, then you have these other business unit CFOs.
and you got your controller or chief accounting officer, you got your VP of FP &A, and then you may or may not have some of these folks like a supply chain CFO, IR, treasurer, risk may be under that roof as well,
but it’s these roles here, the business unit CFO, that this is where you need to know more than just FP &A if you wanna progress. These business unit CFOs effectively serve as kind of mini CFOs across.
oftentimes a very large organization. But as a part of that job as a business unit CFO, you’re overseeing controllership and accounting over here. And you have to have some knowledge of what’s going on. You don’t have to be an expert.
That’s why you have these people on your team. And at the end of the day, they still have a relationship up into the controller. You need to be able to advise them and counsel. And these folks may be dotted line to you. They might be direct to you. But then it extends further, right?
depending on the size of the business, you might have more of these mini CFO type jobs even further down. So this might be somebody who sits at a shop on their own and they’ve got their own FP &A leader and they’ve got their own accountants.
And you need again, you need to understand kind of the whole P &L. And the reason I emphasize this is that these jobs are really fun. You wanna have these roles. Whereas if you just focus on FP &A your whole career,
Career Progression in FP&A
you may get promoted out of those roles and you may not even want to, but you’re going to have one VP of FP &A for the company and you’re going to have your FP &A folks, some of them who might be just HQ people,
some of them might be sitting out in the different business units, but you end up staying on that VP of FP &A track. You could miss out on some of these broader P &L type jobs, which again are the really fun corporate finance jobs in my opinion.
So what do you do in FP &A? Well, honestly, you kind of run the business, FP &A and corporate finance, as a partner to the sales team, the operating team, and you’re really tasked with making sure the financial health of the business is good,
you’re accurately reporting, and you really want to add value as a finance person. So what do you do? Financial statements. This is the backbone, right? The FP &A…
Responsibilities in FP&A
teamed with the, partnered with the accounting team, you’re gonna create financial statements. These are gonna be at all different levels of granularity across the business. It could be for a particular product or a product line or a geography, but you gotta create the financial statements that have to be accurate.
Management reporting and performance management. So this goes beyond just normal financial statements. And this is really where you’re trying to monitor and improve the health of the company. So this is beyond just finance reports.
These are sales reports, operational reports. You’re doing all sorts of different dashboards and KPIs. You’re trending out things. And you should be working closely with those teams, the sales team,
the commercial team, operating team, and providing them insights on the reporting that you’re doing. Planning and budgeting. Now this is not just creating a financial budget. This is doing an annual operating plan. It’s a strategy plan.
And you’re gonna do that as well as longer term planning. There’s gonna be a number of different planning and budgeting processes that go on at each company and it differs business by business, but this is a key part of FP &A.
Financial modeling and decision making support. So this is actually a very broad bucket. If you’re in FP &A roles that are linked closely with the business, you’re gonna be modeling out potential acquisitions or dispositions. You’re gonna be looking at.
capital expenditures, buying new machinery for factories, new projects that you’re looking to take on, maybe even opening a new factory, commercial deals with customers, big complex deals, procurement agreement
where you’re either doing purchasing contracts or getting raw materials for your products, the modeling out what R &D funding, what the returns are on funding and making decisions on that. So you’re really equipping.
the folks you work with to be able to make good decisions. Financial analysis and analytics. This is where finance has been expanding and we really want to get deep into data here. So how deep can you get into data to take it and translate it into insights that the business can
use to understand how the business is actually performing, what the different risks and opportunities that they might not see on the surface. So these are going to be all different data analytics. You’re going to use…
statistics to some extent, but what you really want to get good at as well is doing ad hoc back -of -the -envelope analysis. So what happens if we reduce costs by 1 % or what happens if we change price by 2 % on this small bucket of products?
You want to be able to do those quickly and help your team. Systems, technology, and data, this kind of goes hand -in -hand with the prior item on analytics, but you really need to understand data sources and the quality of that data. And you have to be able to
clean data and get it ready for analysis. Because if you get garbage in, you get garbage out. So this is something that’s become more and more important. And it’s really a partnership with whether it’s your IT team, your digital team, your data science team.
But you have to be able to get the right data. And you also want to be able to do things like automate reports and take out manual work. The last one here is a little bit of a catch all. It’s more of how you do your job. But leadership, partnering with the business.
How do you influence and communicate? You’ll see some really smart financial people who can’t convey what their data says. They can’t communicate it to the general manager, the president, or the sales VPs, or whoever else.
And that’s a critical skill, because it’s kind of useless if you do the analysis and you can’t tell somebody what it means. You also need to be able to influence people. So you’re going to be closest to the data. You’re going to see what’s going on. How can you influence the people who make the decisions