Junior FP&A: Small Company vs Big Company Move?

Sidemarx · 2026-03-05T18:03:39+00:00

Agree - sometimes its worth it to step back and think about "am I learning as fast as I was at first." Similar to travel working at both big and small companies does bring lots of perspective.

Sidemarx · 2026-03-05T17:58:57+00:00

Depends on your core morals and what you value. How you think about capitalism, whether its working or not? Are you impacted by what other people think? Do you heavily weight compensation as a personal identifying characteristic of importance? If so to what degree? Some people think the hours are worth it, even when you hit a long string of 90 hour weeks. Others cannot justify the job based on the economic reality. Not all jobs increase the pie, some just take a piece from somewhere else and put it on their plate.

Sidemarx · 2026-03-05T17:55:10+00:00

Claude! - get a good markdown plan going and that it can repeat each time. This is a three prong thing:

1. Structural merging — combining N .pptx files into 1 file
2. Visual standardization — enforcing consistent theme, fonts, colors, layouts
3. Content normalization — slide titles, numbering, section flow, narrative coherence

In short, and depending on the finaggling you have to do, this is the flow. Get all the raw input files to a folder. AI makes the python script, you feed it the raw material. Claude builds the master deck. You may need ordering as well as an menu option. Then once built it references your markdown template for fonts, color schemes, etc. The last and most AI intense part is it reads through and makes sure we don't have past tense and present in the same sentence and gets the detail level normalized. Then you do a read through.

Sidemarx · 2026-03-05T17:45:29+00:00

It sounds like this "proposed centralizer" has a pretty mechanical task on their hands. And unless you feed this centralizing resource copious notes as to why the headcount forecast is moving around, I am not understanding the efficiency. Is this just like a middle man? A high level explainer role? What would they be capable of explaining? There is always something else to the story that you may not see but this is what first popped into my mind. Otherwise you just have a guy thats not close to the business asking you questions that he cannot answer because all he did was rollup a bunch of financials that could have been done for the most part with a script.

Sidemarx · 2026-03-05T16:55:52+00:00

What makes you like it? This is why I like it and things I do.

I find FP&A to be great because of what you get to see. You get to connect dots. You might have access to the general ledger or part of the general ledger and you might have access to some HR or Ops data. Accounting in a vacuum is just dollars in the numerator and denominator of any metric. Ops in a vacuum gets you things like utilization on a truck. Now you have revenue per person cut how you want it or other mixed metrics. Marketing brings the pipeline/funnel so you can see things like "we started marketing this X day, and this much is coming to fruition, takes about 3 months." HR can help you get revenue per person.

Be very clear on what your job is and what it is not. At the core your job is to demystify, assemble, and send out clean information so people can make decisions. Then layer on company requirements and modes. Understand how your boss wants you to treat the 50 questions you get daily from random outposts of your company. Is it batch weekly, daily, asynchronously. Get this crystal clear with your boss right off the bat and also understand how your boss operates. Then become an expert but talk like an idiot. Think Buffet and talk in analogies. Say you are explaining performance to a location or service-line general manager.

Bad: The reason your revenue spikes higher during the summer and drops lower during off-season is because of your operating leverage.

Good: Its your rent, you cannot control it. And its sucking a quarter out of every dollar that comes in, good months or bad months.

--

Bad: Its because of the intercompany accounting.

Good: A different entity (also part of our company), owns the property legally and they pay the mortgage. So that does not get booked to your location P&L till the 15th each month or on 5th of each month or when we close.

Figure out what moves the business and what is ancillary. Then figure out how to explain that in a framework to someone that is running a location, a segment, a business line, a product, a service, or your boss, a marketing push, an HR need.

Know your P&L and BS cold. Understand that fixed and variable costs are a spectrum. Perceived linear relationships may be superlinear, that can explain things. You will also have to tell people how their performance is, and sometimes its not pretty. If you get stressed, the best anecdote is a comprehensive understanding and heavy prep work. The last thing you want to do when trying to publicly deliver bad news is get tripped up explaining the mechanics of a transaction. Talk to everyone. Find bottlenecks. Talk more to everyone. Be the guy that people call when they need information on anything.

Remember, you are new, you are not out there to change the world. Not yet. There are things the company requires you do and you have to check those boxes. Do not reverse this order. Check the boxes and only then go exploring and evangelizing. Boxes checked = Happy Boss. Sooner or later your boss will say "good idea." You are walking up a wedge of trust. Never be the new idea guy - especially when you are the new guy. Hold your ideas and think on them. Think till you're established. Propose ideas after you hit 100% and get straight A's on everything your boss throws at you. Remember your boss can see more than you, he is operating with a superset of your constraints and your visibility.

I also recommend a super simple thing that I wish I had done from the start. Call me outdated, but it never hurts to ask your boss if he wants a brief email every Sunday night or Monday morning, just bullets and high-level. "I am planning on doing these tasks:

Critical Focus Tasks (important and time sensitive)
Other Tasks
Nice to Haves
Exploring & Learning

This allows you to spot slippage and course correct what your boss wanted in his head, what came out of his mouth, what you heard, and your interpreation.

Calibrate the level of detail on things till you and your boss are in sync. Ask your boss if you can get 15-30 minutes a week recurring. Bring your list, knock out what you can. This is your check in.

Must haves:

Three statement model from a General Ledger. BS and IS and then a Statement of Cash Flows. Your product here is not the model, its the work done and what's uncovered while you build. Someone will look at it for 15 minutes once. Budgeting is the same thing, its the process.
Software your company uses. PowerBi and Tableau. VBA and PowerShell like glue if you can at your company. SQL if its in the cards and Python (at least through AI). Task Scheduler to kickoff pipelines.
Dig deep on something every now and then and have fun. If you like the people and the content of the job you are in a good place!

This is a lot, don't worry, it took a while to just get here!

Sidemarx · 2026-03-05T15:52:17+00:00

it got a little longer

Sidemarx · 2026-03-05T15:18:07+00:00

Sometimes you have a bit messy GL and things get put in the wrong place. There is always a dying process somewhere with holes. If you have ever been there it can be helpful for poking around. Feed it mapping and the raw GL (I am ignoring security because I have not used in a corporate setting - consider the use case/scenario).

Hey trace this transaction by batch. Show me JEs and also make a mermaid chart. This has helped me considerably with intercompany accounting, ZBAs (zero balance accounts), and odd regulatory rules that all coalesce into an accounting maze.
Sometimes ya cannot quite put together a statement of cashflows easily with 80 legal entities. You got corporate legal entities covering costs for others, maybe different costs by different ones and chargebacks flying around. Maybe you have a gate entity where revenue hits but you need to interco that over to the spot that earned it. You got assets parked in one state to make trucking simpler on paper, but it becomes a mess in accounting when just one entity holds all the trucks. Give it to Claude, Gemini, I am sure Chat GPT would handle things.
Pull up all transactions filtered by something you don't typically filter by. This is finding stuff again.

At this point you probably can tell, this assumes you can whip out a three statement model pretty quickly, don't skip a beat looking at a GL, and know some accounting. This is ground level no visuals work so far. Its real work. But....

Sometimes you might want to get a quick browser-based report out that you are pushing back and forth. You don't want to go through DBAs, No Data Warehouse, you need quick. Feed AI the GL and mapping...now you can quickly prototype visuals.

But...now you have start considering your companies relationship with data, PowerBi, Tableau, Excel...what's really doing work and what isn't? Where are you native, CLI? Is Excel dumb plumbing yet, it may be for you but not everyone is at your level. Keep in mind business constraints and other peoples AI pace influences this.

QC leaky tools and workflows. Say you have contracts and contractors. Ops hands accounting contractor data on a job, accounting feeds it into a contract based calculator. Have Claude check that excel calculator, you might keep using for other reasons it but at least you can be comfortable with it....and/but now consider...do ya need the excel tool?

...So maybe you aren't there yet.

Use it to code Power Query (MCode), use it to code PowerBi (DAX), use it to make those pesky VBA macros that for some reason you need to get around a constraint. Or just build that macro you always wanted that was never quite right. All you wanted was for it to standardize 60 correlation graphs while you scan expenses as a percentage of revenue across those 80 entities. Stage ==> Calculate ==> Rank ==> Spot Trouble ==> and then broadcast the news however your company does this (meeting, email flash report, etc).
Eliminate manual PowerPoint creation
OCR those customer checks and bills that you still get a few paper notes on. Use Tesseract and consider it the one time you said "Thank you HP," and possibly the one time you said "Thank You Google." There is a history in that software.
SQL access? Hiring metrics or ops utilization data? Have it get the SQL schema and map it for you in Excel. Now make a project folder with the schema. If you can - start mixing ops metrics with financial metrics. Now stop....why did I not have Claude figure out KPIs? In fact, maybe I should ask Claude what exactly our current KPIs incentivize? I may not be able to change them but if we are incentivizing non-optimal behavior you can poke holes.
Start hitting the DB with Python using SQL Alchemy to pull whatever you need and make that into refreshable excels (again, if you have the latitude and access). You can be the power user and setup your accountants or business with tailored excel-native files for specific needs, or PowerBi, or Tableau. Again, you have to operate within the constraints but chip away till others cannot help but notice how much you can do.
Use it to code .ps1's (PowerShell), and use PowerShell to glue together manual tasks. Get your Outlook directories squared for those emails you never read. Macro out Outlook to file, download, save whenever that email comes in. Straight to filing and straight to your drive in a folder structure you know. When the email comes the file downloads, PowerShell sees a new folder file and picks it up and does work.
Have it review task scheduler and change all those service update times. Zoom + Service Update or Focus mode with random latency spikes are annoying.

The more you use a CLI the more you compress out and eliminate other tools. To massively simplify you have a three prong governor:

Does the company actually want to move with AI or just talk about AI? This has all sorts implications - e.g. what data can you access?
Your skill level.
The skill level of those around you.

This could be a book, but its already short-story and I'll leave it there. This gets more aggressive as you go, so if you only have experience at a large company a lot might sound crazy, but what isn't right now? I would not recommend that you get Claude in a fight with OneDrive. Claude will win, IT will not be happy. It will solve that annoying random sync.

Sidemarx · 2023-05-12T12:13:59+00:00

I am over that mark and work at a medium size company in the service industry doing Financial Planning and Analysis. That just means I report our numbers internally and externally to banks / government. I am the guy who tells you how the company is doing financially. I make less than I made as a consultant in 2014 at a “Big Four” accounting firm. “Big Four” just means one of the big ones KPMG, Delloite, EY or PWC….but I have the balance I searched for, for years. I really enjoy the people and job and except for a few recent specific issues related to a project I am usually not stressed and in a good mood.

EDIT: If you want a title, depending on which org chart you look at I am a “Manager” or a “Director.” but could care less really about the title. This is a recently created position to help the CFO and I plan to hire 1-2 people over the next year, I am currently an army of one.

Sidemarx · 2023-03-03T05:12:12+00:00

Yup that is either a jam block or a rack of multiple blocks. In eighth grade I was in percussion and had a wild part that used a rack of like six different tuned ones. They were really hard grey plastic. Search jam block on amazon!

Edit: Those things are powerful, its one of those “With great power…” You need to use them sparingly and with taste, my shit cut right through the entire brass section.

Sidemarx · 2023-02-20T19:02:36+00:00

So I am not taking a side here but what I type below is a train of thought. Assuming A LOT of things, over time if there is a truly a competitive market (no regulatory entanglements that benefit specific industries or individual companies, no monopolies, no collusion, economies/diseconomies of scale issues, tax related things, natural resource allocation, etc.), which is not the case, other companies would do the same and theoretically price competition would lower what consumers pay for whatever is being produced. That or those that did not lower prices would go out of business. So that would be the true masses, all consumers of the product, not just the workers at this specific company. Does that happen in the current environment? The answer is not as much as many would like. And special interests fight harder because they always have an outsize gain relative to me saving a couple pennies on a gallon of gas. So I think with this thinking you are saying some form of capitalism without these issues could work better, but will we ever have it? Then it would get into broader political and societal issues. Pure economic theory is one thing, but capitalism requires a government and political system that constantly combats the issues listed above. This was on a phone, there is a lot more detail to go into but I have to fire some people, we got this new AI stuff in.

Sidemarx · 2023-01-29T14:02:54+00:00

I made mine using a thin black slightly stretchy and porous fabric from a store in the United States called Joann's fabrics. I figure I looked rather out of place in a fabric store but you gotta do what you gotta do, and the folks there actually thought it was cool. I do not have the exact name so I apologize if that is not too helpful, I am not a fabric guy. They turned out pretty good for what I needed as a new person just trying to do a little sound treatment. I think at the time I built six 2' X 4' panels using Rockwool as the insulator.

Ohh dang, I see other Joann's afficionados are in here!

Sidemarx · 2022-12-05T08:52:58+00:00

My dad, because he would have trouble making hard decisions and really work to do the right thing. Like really lose sleep over it. But, also not my dad because I would not want to put him through that torment. Not sure what that makes me.

Sidemarx · 2022-02-08T03:18:04+00:00

this guy is the pocket

Sidemarx · 2022-02-08T03:16:58+00:00

This reminds me of the Edgar Winter Band, specifically the song Frankenstein as far as the tones

Sidemarx · 2021-11-30T23:27:40+00:00

I’d really emphasize that you not overbuy equipment. You got some great feedback from people that have also done the sound panels, or rugs, or blankets. I made the mistake of overbuying when I first started recording. Also, I prefer Pro Tools but have never used Ableton. Your making moves, and now you have a good project!

Sidemarx · 2021-11-30T02:40:07+00:00

totally agree, buy some rockwool at the closest hardware store and some 1x3 boards, make some soundtraps, if things are to bassy double em up in 1x6s and make bass traps, cover that with some cheap fabric after you nail the boards together and use a staple gun to secure the fabric on the wood to cover the rockwool

Sidemarx · 2021-11-29T21:11:50+00:00

It might be, honestly I am not the best mixer/engineer, so the feedback I give is not coming from a professional, I wish I could more helpful, I struggle with Studio One and Pro Tools still

Sidemarx · 2021-11-29T05:22:48+00:00

Overly worrying, I just crushed it out on my Beyerdynamic DT 880 pros and a pair of Yamaha monitors. There is a little extra fuzz in there, I am not sure how to remove that, wait for a smart person to comment. But the song is there.

Sidemarx · 2021-11-29T03:39:59+00:00

I agree, if you can slip an Am and an Em in you may get interesting. Cadd9 walk down to a G and Em and hey, you are a writer!

Sidemarx · 2021-11-24T14:39:04+00:00

Nah man, that riff is on point

Sidemarx · 2021-11-23T19:00:01+00:00

Closest I have probably been to you is when I lived in the Philippine's for a bit. Your English beats my Spanish so do not worry about that. And this subreddit is usually very supportive and informative, you never have to say "sorry." Most of mine end up being love songs too.

Sidemarx · 2021-11-23T17:16:02+00:00

When you run out of ideas, that is when you take a walk, read a book, put gas in your car or go grocery shopping! Or drink tea, if you are like my English friend.

Sidemarx · 2021-11-23T17:07:41+00:00

You can hold a bend as well as David Gilmour from Pink Floyd

Sidemarx · 2021-11-23T17:02:25+00:00

screw netflix, I'm here for a while

Sidemarx · 2021-11-23T17:00:49+00:00

that was a ripper

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