Finance Manager - FP&A

Academic Partnerships assists primarily regional universities in increasing their access and impact by making their academic programs available to students online. Founded in 2007, AP’s mission is to expand access to high-quality, affordable, and workforce-relevant education, especially for working and adult students. AP brings single-minded dedication to student success, an integrated set of services, and data-driven performance to our collaboration with university partners.

POSITION SUMMARY

The Manager, Financial Planning & Analysis is a high-profile position within the Finance team of an approximate $0.5B Private Equity backed, dynamic online education company. This role reports directly to the Vice President – Strategic Revenue.  This key role helps support the development of the annual revenue budget and forecast workstream for the company.  This includes coordination with operational leadership to capture development of leads, new enrollments and marketing spend for approximately 115 partner universities and 2,000 plus degree programs for these partners. 

The role helps oversee the historical, current and forecast revenue component of the company’s financial planning, coordination, and monthly consolidation (reporting and analysis) activities and ensures that revenue plans and forecasts are completed by the operating groups with the appropriate due diligence to assure accuracy and data integrity. The role drives accountability through developing and deploying metrics to measure success and identifying risks and opportunities within the operating group activities.

The role will assist the VP in making well informed, data-driven decisions that ultimately impact the company’s revenue achievement and profitability goals. The role provides financial and operational insights and support for operating group and corporate performance measurement and is responsible for frequent ad hoc analyses. This position provides high exposure to leadership in the finance organization.

PRIMARY JOB ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Manages key revenue drivers and forecast/actual processes to ensure monthly results, annual revenue success, recurring forecasts, and other operating group reporting activities are completed with accuracy and data integrity.
• Partners with the operational teams, corporate finance team and the accounting/billing team to assure proper linkage and priorities to support financial reporting, including the development of a data warehouse with historical and forecast scenario detail.  (Move from Excel to data warehouse for collection and reporting of actual and forecast scenario granular detail).
• Collaborates on ad-hoc projects from the finance leadership team and operational partners requiring financial analytic support.
• Responsible for monthly revenue performance review activities and interacting with various operating group leaders to ensure comprehensive understanding of key drivers throughout the student lead to graduation funnel that impact revenue performance vs plan and prior year, and implications for future forecasts.
• Develops various monthly reports to enhance understanding of revenue performance including leading indicators to provide operational insights well in advance of monthly revenue actuals.
• Prepares and oversees revenue results and analytics for the marketing / operations group leadership. Help the VP of Finance to ensure the revenue explanations include a clear interpretation of key drivers, insights into operational trends, and action plans to mitigate/moderate issues as needed.  Requires strong financial modeling capability and comfort managing extremely large data sets.
• Develops a deep understanding of the operational, billing, and revenue systems and processes, and gains insights into how key marketing and operational assumptions impact billing / revenue performance.
• Develops ad-hoc financial analysis and reporting for corporate businesses reporting, external requests, and private equity ownership reporting.
• Extensive use and support of financial systems including NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, SQL, Tableau, and data warehouse management.
   

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS AND TASKS

• Works effectively with a wide range of internal and external customers on revenue insights
• Works effectively and positively with a high degree of autonomy in a matrix environment
• Prepares monthly revenue review materials for executive leadership reviews
• Designs solutions for non-routine projects with advanced ability to create complex models with minimal guidance and supervision
• Drives monthly reporting on billings and revenue recognition
• Ad-hoc analysis and projects from Finance leadership

KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERTISE

• Expert Excel and PowerPoi