I am currently working as a finance manager at MSQ.

MSQ is an advertising and marketing

company based in UK but we have also services and offices here in the US. I currently support
two business units with the guidance and support from my regional CFO who is also here in the
US.
One of the biz is on the media side where we do media buys and media planning so basically we
would purchase spots on social media, tv, radio, or magazine to run client commercials or
advertisements for our clients and the other company is more on the creativity side that we do
designs for our clients such as content designs, logo designs, or rebranding type of work for our
clients. So overall I support those two business units with their daily business operations such as
overseeing cash reconciliation, ar, ap, or wip transactions just to make sure there is no crazy
outstanding balance would show up on our balance sheet or aging report. If there is something
off then I would work with our team what’s causing it whether there is delay on client payment
or billing errors so I can take actions accordingly and I also manage financial reporting this
include preparing annual budget with 3 year strategic finance plan that’s over about $100M in
revenue. And we have different types of revenue in our business such as media revenue, retainer
fees, and project fees that we bill on # of hours and project completion.

Conducting comprehensive p&l analysis on both revenue and expenses to better understand
what’s driving our variances and what’s the impact of those variances on P&L, so I can present
actionable insights to my CFO and MD, that we may either need to adjust some of our numbers
or push them into a later month, or release some of our accruals so our margin can match close
with our forecast. (Revenue usually we don’t touch unless we are off a lot then we may ask our
team if there is any additional projects they can prioritize or but we usually would adjust or
release accruals from FL cost, T&E, or accruals in our legal fee, or some cost in repairs, G&A
stuff)
On top of that I also work closely with other teams and departments to understand what’s driving
our business either on revenue or expense side so I can incorporate those changes into my
monthly P&L reforecast.
For example, I have weekly meetings with our account and PM teams to understand what’s going
on with our revenue, so basically we would go over status of project completion on our business
pipeline that’s where our revenue is coming from.
1. (1.billing, 2.regvenue recognized vs. forecast. 3. Delayed projects) We would go over
how much we can bill out to our clients for the current month and any billing catch up
from previous month so it would reduce potential risk in accrued revenue, and how much
revenue we have recognized vs. the number we forecasted at client level so I can provide
guidance to our team on what client project they should prioritize so it would make our
 revenue more aligned with our forecast. Or do we have any delayed projects or
cancellations So I can provide variance commentaries during month end.

2. And I would also provide pricing analysis based on different staffing strategies that we
get from our team so they can present those to our clients and negotiate client
SOW/contract, which potentially will increase our revenue from new biz. Sometimes, I
even help review client contracts just to ensure we have proper language included for the
service we are providing. So we don’t get into trouble with revenue recognition later on
when we get audited.

3. Then I also provide a weekly analysis on employee utilization to our team leads that
gives them visibility into our labor capacity with client billable hours so they can see
which team or individual has more capacity to support additional client work so they can
assign projects more accordingly with their teams. (too much detail or sometimes they
may ask me why there is a drop-in client billable hour they may work new biz)
sometimes they make hiring decisions based on my analysis if there is no capacity can be
found in our teams.

4. Other than that we don’t have much variables in our cost other than some FL cost that
varies based on client needs, or maybe when someone left the company then I need to
work with their direct manager or department heads to understand how urgent we need to
backfill that position and what’s their expectation so I can incorporate it into my P&L
forecast as part of the HC planning, or sometimes we may have some unexpected T&E,
or additional software purchase either related to client work or internal use, our rent,
amortization and deprecation or other G&A costs are pretty much the same month over
month.

5. (I also oversee some accounting transactions such as fixed assets, some unrealized
gains/losses on Foreign exchange due to fluctuations on different rates
6.
So overall, I have about 8 years of experience in FP&A and I like to find synergy in my work so
I can standardize and streamline some of our processes and I also like to build different financial
models that could help business to make better financial decisions, such as pricing models,
a full dynamic P&L with balancesheet included by using advanced excel formulas and functions
such as sumifs, index match, sumproduct which is a fancy version of index match to me, or
power query to consolidate different source of data, so it can provide real time information with
all the detail and backup from our general ledger. I have also created different pricing models
based on different scenarios and my templates are usually very user-friendly even for non
finance folks I have drop downs that allow people to select different number of hours, number of
employees and titles then my template would automatically calculate the fee that we will be
charging to our client, profit and margin. I also have charts and graphs in my templates that
shows performance and comparsions between actuals and forecast or budget
( I have also created more complex template that significantly reduced manual effort and the time
spent on billings from a full day process down to less than 2 hour process by using excel macros
to generate 100+ monthly invoices. (16 different reports and each of them have different
numbers of columns, headers))