I'm a CFO looking for an FP&A analyst to handle the day to day.
- Please don't contact me outside of Upwork
- Please read my whole summary. I put time into writing a clear and detailed description. It'd be nice if you could be equally thoughtful
- It's very obvious when you copy and paste pitches. While I appreciate the efficiency gains on your end, please don't do that here.
• *Background**
My client is a mature SaaS startup mired in spreadsheets and manual processes. They have banking, HR, and operating systems in place, but their processes and tools are still entirely spreadsheet-driven and are constantly questioning the veracity of their own reports/data.
They fired their last FP&A team because of (1) work quality, (2) attention to detail (3) responsiveness.
This is not for someone looking to coast, but neither are there stupidly ridiculous 24/7 expectations. It's normal people just working hard to grow a young business.
Please note, that this is daily-client-facing work. A lot of Upwork jobs are the kind of thing you can do on nights and weekends to fit your schedule -- this isn't it. It's 20-30 day-time weekly hours with meetings on the fly thrown in.
• *Scope**
This HANDS-ON role will spend 50% of the time maintaining an elaborate 13-week cash flow file (like 2-3 meetings a week, 2-3 updates a week, 10-20 hours a week). The person who created this was NOT an idiot, but this is clunky, filled with formula errors and needs to be rebuilt -- but for now, it's the lifeblood of the organization. Step 1 after onboarding will be addressing: What is our actual burn? How many days do we have left?
20% of the time will be spent on AR/AP. Most of the SaaS subscriptions are turned-on and billed through Chargebee software, but there are enterprise deals with separate AR workflows. Step 2 will be optimizing workflows and visibility to money in/out. More of a controller role, but still critical.
10% is spent on HR operations. They use Rippling and most of these workflows have been automated, but someone needs to pop into the system from time to run payroll/contractor payments. Executives have a heavy-hand here, so this is more like light administration.
20% is spent on Ad Hoc firefighting, addressing investor questions, updating financial models, building short-term tools to address "what-if" scenarios, metric and KPI tracking and answering the "should we, could we, can we" questions.
• *Freelancer Profile**
- Savvy Excel & Sheets (I know, duh, but I'd characterize the difference as more than just replacing VLOOKUP with INDEX/MATCH. It's more like uses Index/Match with multiple matching criteria or replacing SUMIFS/COUNTIFS statements with far out SUMPRODUCT formulas to jam a ton of unique conditions into one lookup to retrieve information more reliably)
- General understanding of data architecture and staging data intelligently for other tabs to retrieve it in order to make a maintenance/updating process less onerous when repeated regularly.
- Tech Savvy - Needs to get into systems like Rippling, Chargebee, Truist, Brex and Xero to extract information without a lot of (if any) hand-holding
- Semi-obsessive attention to detail - So much could break so easily. There's going to be a tremendous amount of trust in the accuracy/quality of the data.
- A lack of EGO will help. This is more junior work, but a person who came up the ranks proving they could do it, can likely help get this company out of the hole by digging in with the admin and working their way to more interesting stuff.