A Day in the Life of a Finance Manager at Microsoft
A day in the life of a Finance Manager at Microsoft, as described by Andrew, revolves around supporting product teams by understanding product costs and performance, and is heavily involved in the "rhythm of business" which includes monthly closing, forecasting, and budgeting. Work also involves presenting findings in presentations using metrics, such as monthly active users or consumed units, and collaborating with global teams, balancing engineering-focused meetings with typical finance reporting.
Financial Analysis, Product Costing, Budgeting and Forecasting, Cross-functional Collaboration, Performance Reporting
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Andrew Sullivan
Finance Manager
Microsoft
Wake Forest University
Georgia Institute of Technology
Finance
Technology
Finance
Honors Student, Greek Life Member
Video Highlights
1. A finance manager supports product teams (engineering teams) by understanding how the product works and its underlying costs.
2. A significant part of the role involves 'rhythm of business' activities, including monthly closing of books, analyzing profit and loss (P&L) for specific products and the company overall, and forecasting/budgeting.
3. The role involves working with various metrics like monthly active users (MAU) or consumption units (e.g., security compute units) to understand costs, sales, and infrastructure growth, often requiring collaboration with global teams via tools like Excel and Teams.
Transcript
What does a day in the life of a finance manager look like?
In my role as a product group finance manager, I support our product teams, which are the engineering teams that build the actual products. This involves a lot of day-to-day interaction with those engineering teams. We work with them to understand how a product or service works and its underlying cost.
From a finance perspective, much of our daily work is what we call "rhythm of business." For a public company, this includes a routine monthly closing process. Each month, we close the books, pull all the numbers, and look at how our profit and loss shapes up for each specific product. We also analyze the overall picture, like what Microsoft Security's P&L looks like, and what Azure's P&L entails, as some products are part of the Azure P&L. We collaborate with the Azure team to figure this out.
This rhythm also includes forecasting and budgeting, all of which are done on a monthly basis. Quarterly reporting for earnings is more scrutinized and important. However, on a monthly basis, we refresh all the numbers to see what happened the previous month.
From there, we build PowerPoint decks and update slides that tell the story of why our spend might have differed from the forecast or budget, or where we saw improvements. Alongside spend analysis, we always look at metrics like monthly active users (MAU) or consumptive numbers. Some products are based on consumed units.
For example, our product security co-pilot runs on a "security compute unit," which essentially amounts to a bunch of tokens. Each time a customer uses it, they consume tokens, which translates to a security compute unit. We track this to determine the monthly cost and average selling price. We also analyze usage numbers because if infrastructure costs, like Azure spend, are growing month-over-month, we want this growth to align closely with the growth in monthly active users. Ideally, spend should grow at a slightly slower rate to increase margins.
As I mentioned, we spend a lot of our day in Excel and on Teams, connecting with different teams. Microsoft is a very global workplace. Cybersecurity, for instance, is interesting as we support many teams based in Israel, as well as the West Coast. Although I'm based in Atlanta, we support teams in Seattle and San Francisco. This means you get to work with people from all over. Our work is split between engineering-focused meetings and typical finance meetings where we report out the numbers.
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