Speaker 1: Financial Planning and Analysis, or FP&A, is typically the department or area that a non-financial services company will hire the most finance professionals. It can be a pretty well-paying and stable career and will certainly appeal to certain types of personalities, I would say. I spent the first two years of my career in FP&A, so today I'm going to give you my thoughts on the profession. First, let's talk about what purpose does FP&A serve in a business. You essentially have two sides to this profession. You have the planning side and the analysis side. Let's talk about the analysis side. So typically how this works is like executives and vice presidents, they have different questions that they want to ask about the business. So you might have to put together reports that kind of give them like a holistic view what might have happened in the previous month or the previous quarter or the previous year and kind of compare time periods over or different time periods. And then after that, they're going to have questions like, oh, why is like last month, why was the depreciation so much higher than we would have expected? And then the executive will ask the VP, who will ask the director, who will ask the manager, who will then ask the analyst, and it's kind of like a big telephone game. And then the analyst will have to go into the system of record and find, oh, we bought this machine and that made depreciation higher. Then they'll report back up the chain in this big telephone game. And now the executive or VP, they have the answer to their question. And so, you know, that's a lot of what FP&A is. And then it's really routine in some ways. And then on the planning side, so every business basically is going to have like a financial plan that they'll have to report to and try to stick to. So the FP&A analysts or managers will have to go around to all the different teams every year and ask them, how many people do you plan to have on your team? Like, what's your headcount? How much are you planning on paying these people? You planning on hiring any consultants? What's your budget for that? And kind of putting in like the total cost for each team. And then all the teams will consolidate. And then there'll be some people who are assigned to try to determine the company's revenue. And then you'll adjust this plan every month or every quarter. And so that's really the planning side. I gave you the analysis side as well. Next, I'd like to talk about the pros and cons of working in financial planning and analysis. So the first pro I would say is decent work-life balance. I think the job is relatively low hours outside of like when you have a quarter-end or year-end, et cetera. Number two, it has good job security. So this isn't a job where you're really hitting benchmarks. You're not a profit generator. So there's not as much stress to like earn money for the company. Number three, you do have good exposure to high-level executives and vice presidents. Like I mentioned earlier, they're relying on you for information. And number four, it's a relatively easy job. Look, FB&A is not rocket science. And so this is part of what makes me think it's kind of a more laid-back career. And going into the cons, number one, it is a very routine job, at least from my perspective, when I was in FB&A. It felt like I was doing the same thing every month. Like this report's due at this time. This report's due at that time. And it just felt so routine. Number two, it's a relatively lower-paid career. And I think that comes with the fact that it's kind of lower hours, lower stress. So, you know, whatever your personality is. Number three, kind of bad exit opportunities. It's really going to lead itself. Like if you're an FB&A analyst, your best option next is like a senior FB&A analyst. It's not really going to lead towards high finance. And number four, even though it says finance in the title, it's more of an accounting role. People with finance degrees or finance backgrounds, they'll view this as a con. People from accounting backgrounds, they'll view this as a pro. And last, let's talk about how to get into FB&A. So for your typical FB&A analyst role, entry-level role, I think you might just need like a bachelor's in finance or accounting with a preference towards accounting. If you really want to move up the chain in an FB&A career, your best options might be looking towards a master's in finance or accounting or MBA or a CPA if you want to rise the ranks. Now, if you enjoyed this video, please subscribe for more just like it. Thank you.