Start with the work your finance lead needs to hand over
"Help with finance" covers several different jobs. A finance manager may organize the monthly reporting cycle, turn actuals into a rolling view of cash and operating performance, and explain a variance to the people who own the underlying plan. Accounting supplies reconciled source information; business owners explain changes in their plans; the CFO or finance lead approves the decisions. Write down which of those owners is already in your company before combining duties.
The Association for Financial Professionals describes FP&A work as comparing actual results with the budget, finding the cause of a variance and updating the outlook with the business. Use that distinction in the role brief: analysis and recommendations belong to the finance workstream, while management decisions and source assumptions need named owners. See the AFP guide to budgeting and variance analysis. For candidate testing, our US GAAP and NetSuite close assessment covers accounting evidence, and the FP&A forecasting work sample covers a separate analysis exercise.
Fictional Series B workload: one hire, three deadlines
This planning example is fictional. It is not an Opus placement or a client result. A company's accounting partner reconciles the books after month-end. The CFO wants a weekly view of cash needs. A monthly board forecast is due before the close is fully reviewed. Each team lead owns the assumptions behind hiring, revenue and vendor costs.
- The accounting owner publishes the date and status of each close input. The finance manager records which values are final and which are still provisional.
- Department leads confirm their hiring, collection and spending assumptions. The finance manager ties each change to an owner and updates the forecast with a dated version.
- The manager prepares the board view with actuals, outlook changes and open questions. The CFO reviews assumptions and approves the material decisions before the board materials go out.
If the accounting review misses the board deadline, the brief needs an agreed provisional-data rule. The finance manager can label incomplete inputs and show how they change the outlook; the CFO decides whether those inputs are suitable for the board package. If the team has no accounting owner or no available CFO reviewer, recruiting alone will not settle that dependency.
Copy this search intake into your role brief
Complete one record before sending the search to a provider. Use the company's real deadlines and systems; leave estimates marked unknown until the source owner confirms them.
- Company stage and the operating team this person will support.
- First recurring output, its audience, deadline and decision it should inform.
- Data source, accounting owner, operational assumption owners and current review status for each input.
- Work included in the role: close coordination, cash reporting, forecast, management reporting or a named subset.
- Work outside the role, such as bookkeeping, tax filing, payment approval, audit sign-off or authority to change a department budget.
- Finance lead who will review the first report and how much time they can reserve for the recurring cycle.
- Current accounting system, planning files and known gaps between them.
- Evidence requested from each finalist, with technical assessment and finance-lead review kept in your existing interview process.
Ask the candidate to describe how they would label an incomplete source, question an operating assumption and prepare an update for a non-finance leader. Do not ask them to repair live company books as a hiring exercise. Use the existing fictional FP&A assessment when modeling or forecast analysis is central to the job, or the finance-manager close exercise when close ownership is the requirement. The interview owner should choose the exercise from the role's actual work rather than asking every candidate to complete both.
Agree ownership before the start date
The role brief should name who supplies the data, who can explain each assumption, who reviews the draft and who can approve a business decision. Your contract owner should also confirm the monthly service scope and the named responsibilities for the placement. Opus publishes its recruiting and ongoing administration model on the Series B hiring guide; set the finance responsibilities for this opening in the written search brief and proposed agreement.
If the role calls for structured modeling rather than monthly close work, start with the dedicated FP&A analyst hiring page. If the role calls for systems reconciliation or journal-entry review, keep the requirements and interview evidence aligned with the accounting owner.