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How does @Dentsu India interview process works? I had a total of 5 rounds After first 2 they said they are ok with me but they think I am more suitable for 2 other roles,if I want any of them they will redirect. Then I chose the second JD, i had 2 more rounds of interviews and they said they are happy with me and let the HR do their formalities. But after 3 days when I called HR, i was told they are having few more interviews with other candidates and will confirm me! Dentsu Creative
Especially for companies doing heavy hiring!
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Additional Posts in Accounting
Made it through another day of the Hunger Games!
I am WAY TOO nice to be in public accounting….
How do i see my utilization?
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For me the biggest thing was how "FP&A" was defined differently across different companies. And I'm not referring to industry differences. It's a big thing you'll see both as you're interviewing in FP&A (if you ask the right questions) and as you work in it. I was pretty frustrated in my first FP&A role because it wasn't what I thought.
I would say FP&A gets divided into 3 areas, with any given job varying how much they do of each.
1. Accounting: This happens when the accounting group isn't well established or for whatever reason finance just owns some accounting processes. I had a lot of this in my first role and didn't like it since it wasn't the finance work I envisioned.
2. Budgeting/forecasting/reporting: What you typically think of and is pretty routine. It's better than accounting imo but it's still numbers, spreadsheets, and slide decks...
3. Strategic finance / ad-hoc projects: These are the "sexy" part of FP&A. Sometimes this may be a separate group entirely (strategic finance, corp dev, etc).
My first FP&A job was typically 50/50 accounting / forecasting. Occasionally some ad-hoc projects. The accounting stuff wasn't what I wanted, but at the same time this is probably what allowed me to get the role in the first place (big 4 CPA but from IA, so zero finance experience). I made a huge push to reduce it by handing it off to accounting / offshore teams and was able to reduce it significantly. Also got asked to do various ad-hoc projects with the extra time due to the trust and reputation I built.
I since left that role and my new role is more 50/50 of forecasting / projects. I still have some oversight of accounting because ultimately my analysis relies on their work being accurate, but I'm not actually doing any accounting work. Much bigger fan of that.
A bit of a long answer, but I guess just be ready for it to look different than what you may expect, but you'll learn a lot which will open doors to roles you may find more interesting. Financial modeling is a very valuable skill that you may not get in roles like audit. I am hoping my next step is a role that is 100% projects / ad-hoc /strategic finance work, but I'm good with where I'm at for now.
For a company that small I would expect a lot of accounting. The strategic projects tend to take a back seat when you're spending all your time fixing JEs and validating reconciliations...
I would ask more detailed questions about what the role entails, is it internal or external reporting, what ERP system are they using, do they have plans to change ERP systems in the future, also if they have multiple divisions and part of the role is consolidations what does that look like? Are they all on the same ERP system or is there a significant amount of manual calcs being done? I thought it was crazy that I was working for a fortune 100 company and consolidating divisions in an excel spreadsheet. I also think the teams in the external reporting roles had it a bit easier because there as so much more support and focus on the 10k reporting whereas we ran pretty lean and as you probably know certain groups and divisions consolidate differently for internal reporting vs. external reporting. When I left my Director had said to me of I had joined the company 3 years earlier I would have had an entirely different experience. He also said if I worked in the other group where all divisions were on the same ERP system I probably wouldn’t have had such a bad experience.
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