How to Hire a “Finance Person”

Accounting and FP&A are not the same

Finance DOES NOT mean “accounting.”

Common flow goes like this:

1️⃣ Smart engineers start company

2️⃣ Smart engineers start hiring and spending money

3️⃣ Smart engineers start getting lots of invoices and expenses and have no way to track it

4️⃣ Investor asks founders for Operating Model and Forecast

CEO gives the directive: “We need a finance person. Make a JD.”

JD is made…”CPA strongly preferred.”

Also in the JD: “experience with FP&A and financial forecasting”

In most cases, these are TWO DIFFERENT ROLES.

The person tracking AP/AR and doing taxes IS (most often) NOT the person that will build your operating model and help tell your company’s story to investors with numbers.

Strategic Finance/FP&A is very different from accounting. And a Strat Fin person often won’t be the expert in or want to do journal entries and bank reconciliations.

A lot of people will have some experience with both, but it’s rare to find a person that’s *great* at both.

You wouldn’t hire a Mech E and expect them to be able to sort of do an EEs job at expert level.