FP&A Expert

Domain Expert – FP&A (Financial Forecaster)

To qualify you must use Financial Forecaster regularly, weekly or more, as a working part of your job, with 5+ years of professional FP&A experience as an FP&A analyst/manager, financial reporting or technical accounting analyst, lender-reporting or treasury analyst, or controller.

Financial Forecaster knowledge we require

Working the model

• Multidimensional models: navigating models, dimensions and account hierarchies, and reading a cube slice at an exact coordinate rather than at whatever grain the UI lands on

• Scenarios: creating one, setting its parent, knowing what it inherits versus holds in its own cells, and locking it — plus identifying the forecast of record by its lock or acceptance date

• Accounts and assumptions: telling an input account from a calculated one, and knowing when to fix a figure by editing the account formula versus overriding an assumption cell, because the two are not interchangeable and the grader can tell

• CSV imports: loading actuals and driver data, and the unit and scale discipline an import demands

• Note surfaces: scenario notes, driver notes, policy notes, planning notes, assumption change logs and variance commentary — and which one a given statement belongs in

• Knowing what Financial Forecaster cannot do, so you can recognize a task that asks for a figure or a dimension member the model will never produce

Reading models & packs

• Reading a scenario fluently: what is an input versus a calculated account, which cells are overridden, what a scenario inherits from its parent versus holds itself

• Reading a reporting pack against the model behind it: tracing a printed figure back to the account, scenario and coordinate it came from, and telling a real tie-out from a coincidence

• Recognizing the vintage that governs: which scenario is the forecast of record, when it was locked or accepted, and why a later forecast does not silently supersede an approved one

• Decoding a coordinate (Time, Entity, Department, Product/Product Line, Region, and facility dimensions like Debtor or Aging Bucket) and knowing what a figure means at that grain versus aggregated

Finding & tying out the number

• Navigating account hierarchies and scenario trees to locate the figure that actually drives a covenant, a KPI, or a disclosure — targeted retrieval instead of scrolling the model

• Unit and scale traps: thousands-versus-dollars mismatches, a cost base that cannot be reconciled to its own revenue, per-period versus LTM versus fiscal-year-to-date, and sniffing out a figure that is off by 10× or 1,000×

• Reconciling two in-world sources that disagree, and judging which one governs

Entity structure & governing documents

• The reporting landscape: legal entity versus department versus segment versus consolidated, and which level a given obligation is measured at

• Credit agreement mechanics: the provision fixing the accounting basis (frozen GAAP), Test Periods and test dates, fixed charge coverage and total net leverage, Consolidated EBITDA add-backs and their caps, Consolidated Funded Indebtedness, borrowing base and Eligible Accounts, redetermination, and who must sign a compliance certificate

• Case relationships in the financial sense: parent and child scenarios, consolidated versus entity results, and how an amendment, consent or waiver changes the measure going forward

Measure types & classification

• GAAP versus non-GAAP versus covenant measures, and why the same label can mean three different numbers in one pack

• Non-GAAP discipline: exclusions requiring a written determination that an amount is not normal and recurring, reconciliation to the nearest GAAP measure, equal prominence, and restating prior periods when a metric definition changes

• Forecast versus projection under the AICPA PFI guidance, range presentations whose endpoints must be comparably likely, and what a reasonably objective basis requires

• The standards that decide the answer: going concern and the look-forward window (ASC 205-40), operating segments and the CODM (ASC 280), materiality screening (SAB 99 / Topic 1M), KPI disclosure (Release 33-10751), known trends in MD&A (Reg S-K Item 303), valuation allowances as a discrete item versus through the annual effective rate

Documents, records & workflow

• Document types: compliance certificate, borrowing base certificate, lender package, board or committee pre-read, earnings release and reconciliation, disclosure committee memo, workpaper, and what each is for

• What a finished deliverable