Building Leadership Through Community with Mark Dempster, The Circle by Founders Circle Capital

Hi, this is Ryan Brown for MockQuestions.com. In today's video, we will be discussing five finance manager interview questions. But before we do that, just a quick disclaimer, these questions are not guaranteed to be asked at your interview. I pulled all of today's questions and answers from our website, MockQuestions.com. Now, let's get started. Question number one. Describe how previous experience has prepared you for the finance manager role. Use this opportunity to expand on your experience, as it specifically relates to the finance manager role. Some key areas to highlight may include performing nuts and bolts accounting functions in early roles, such as journal entries and balance sheet reconciliation. Other areas you can highlight may be managing staff and involvement in the budgeting and forecasting process. I believe my past experience in previous roles has prepared me well for the finance manager position. I have a strong foundation in financial accounting, having started my career as a staff accountant, where I was heavily involved in the monthly close process. Next, I moved over to the financial planning and analysis side of finance, where I learned how to budget and forecast. I was then promoted to a manager role, where I developed soft skills that helped me become a better leader. Question number two. How would your management style change if your employees and team members worked remotely full-time or part-time? Many professionals are working remotely in the wake of the 2020 pandemic. Even as things return to normal, a partial or full remote work environment may be common in the future. Speak to changes to your management style that you have implemented in previous roles. The 2020 pandemic has allowed me to revisit how I manage my team and adjust in a few areas. For example, I realized that I must be more flexible as each team member has unique family and other demands that impact their work-life balance. This forced me to adjust deadlines to focus on higher priority deliverables. Additionally, I can no longer drop by my team member's desk to catch up, so I started scheduling weekly check-ins. Question number three. Have you ever had to explain complex accounting concepts to non-finance leaders? How did you go about the task? This is a question to gain insight into your communication skills. Finance managers and other financial leaders will often need to present to other leaders and colleagues who may not have strong financial backgrounds. Give a specific example of a time when you were able to communicate with other non-finance functions. When I was a finance manager at ABC Retailers, we noticed that bad debt expenses was higher than normal. After analyzing the situation, we determined that our sales teams would need to change their product selection in order to return bad debt expense to an acceptable level. In order to do this effectively, I first needed to explain what we were seeing on the financial reporting side and the impact to the financial statements. I created a deck that laid out some concepts like accrual accounting and the components of how bad debt expense was measured. These were concepts I knew the audience would not be familiar with. Then I also gave examples of what steps could be taken from the sales side and the impact it would have financially. This process helped the sales team understand the importance of getting bad debt under control. Question number four. What are some benchmarks that you compare actual results to when completing monthly analysis? When analyzing actual results, a finance manager should compare to benchmarks. Most commonly, comparisons will be to last year actuals, budget, and prior forecast. Actual versus forecast should theoretically have the lowest variances as it was built off the most recent information. Actuals versus last year may have some noise variances from big items that occurred last year, but not in current year or vice versa. The current year budget may or may not have accounted for this noise. There are three benchmarks that I typically use to analyze actual results. The first benchmark is versus last year. Actuals versus last year will help explain growth and decline in various accounts versus the previous year. Many external parties, such as investors, are interested in performance versus last year. The second benchmark is versus budget. At the beginning of the year, we built the annual budget, which essentially lays out targets for the year. Each month, we want to analyze how we are doing versus budget so that business practices can be adjusted in order to realize full year budget targets. The third benchmark is versus prior forecast. Each month, we prepared a forecast for the remainder of the year. We use this benchmark to analyze how close actuals came to our expectations. Question number five. What skills or qualities do you believe a good finance manager should possess? Highlight that a finance manager should have good technical skills. In other words, they have the knowledge to do the job. Also, they should have an analytical mind. They should be curious and inquisitive and will be thorough when it comes to reviewing statements and catching errors. I believe a good finance manager should first have the technical skills required to do the job. They should have a thorough understanding of accounting, the budgeting process, and other relevant knowledge areas. Secondly, the person should be analytical and persistent in their pursuit of an answer. This is extremely helpful when investigating variances. Finally, I believe that a good finance manager should be able to limit errors and mistakes by being detail-oriented and meticulous when it comes to reviewing work. Thank you for watching. If you want more finance manager interview questions, then head over to mockquestions.com and get started.