FP&A

Financial Planning & Analysis Recruitment

FD Capital recruits permanent FP&A professionals for UK businesses — from FP&A Analysts and FP&A Managers through to Heads of FP&A. Every candidate we place holds a recognised accountancy or finance qualification and has demonstrable experience in financial modelling, budgeting, forecasting and commercial finance analysis.
Adrian Lawrence FCA
, founder of FD Capital and a Fellow of the ICAEW, leads our senior finance recruitment practice. We place FP&A professionals across technology and SaaS businesses, PE-backed portfolio companies, financial services firms and mid-market corporates. For engagement types other than permanent see our Fractional FP&A, Part-Time FP&A and Interim FP&A pages.

Adrian Lawrence FCA — Founder, FD Capital
Fellow of the ICAEW | ICAEW-Registered Practice | FP&A and senior finance placements since 2018

Permanent FP&A recruitment requires precise brief definition before sourcing. A business that needs a technically deep financial modeller to own the three-statement model and support a fundraise has a different brief from one that needs a commercially oriented FP&A Manager to partner with the sales and marketing functions and drive revenue visibility. Both are FP&A but the candidate profiles are different.

FD Capital spends time at brief stage understanding the specific analytical output the business needs, not just the job title it wants to fill.

The FP&A Analyst is the entry point to the function — responsible for building and maintaining financial models, preparing management reporting packs, performing variance analysis and supporting the budget and forecast cycles. Typical backgrounds include newly qualified ACA, ACCA or CIMA professionals with two to four years of post-qualification experience in a commercial finance environment. Strong Excel modelling skills are a minimum requirement;

experience with planning tools such as Adaptive Insights, Anaplan, Vena or Planful is increasingly common and commands a premium. For a full breakdown of what the role involves see our FP&A Job Description.

The FP&A Manager owns the planning cycle — running the budgeting and forecasting process, managing a small team of analysts, producing the management reporting and working directly with the CFO or Head of FP&A on strategic financial analysis. The FP&A Manager brief in PE-backed businesses often includes investor reporting, covenant modelling and preparation of the financial information pack for board and sponsor meetings.

Candidates typically hold ACA, ACCA or CIMA qualifications with four to eight years of post-qualification experience, including demonstrable exposure to the full FP&A cycle rather than just financial reporting.

The Head of FP&A leads the entire planning and analysis function — setting the methodology, owning the long-range plan, managing the team, and acting as the senior commercial finance partner to the CEO and CFO. In businesses building a dedicated FP&A centre of excellence for the first time, the Head of FP&A designs the function, selects the planning technology, recruits the team and establishes the processes and standards that will govern how the business plans and analyses its financial performance.

This is a senior appointment typically reporting to the CFO and requiring significant prior experience of running an FP&A function rather than simply working within one.

The defining technical skill for FP&A professionals is financial modelling — the ability to build clean, auditable, dynamic financial models that the business can rely on for planning and decision support. FD Capital assesses modelling capability directly in the screening process, not by proxy through qualification status. The quality, structure and auditability of a candidate’s models matters more than the complexity of the tools they use — a well-constructed three-statement model in Excel tells us more than a poorly designed Anaplan implementation.

The best FP&A professionals are commercially curious — interested in understanding what drives the…