How to write it
State the size of what you analyse
A financial analyst working on a $420M business unit and one working on a $4M cost centre do recognisably different jobs, and a reviewer can't tell which you are unless you say. Put the revenue, budget or portfolio value in the summary.
This is the fastest calibration available, and it makes every subsequent number on the page interpretable. "Identified $2.3M of annual overspend" means something quite different against a $95M cost base than against a $950M one.
Forecast accuracy is the profession's quality metric
Almost nobody puts it on a resume, and it's the most direct evidence of competence an FP&A analyst can offer. Accuracy against actuals, with a before and after, demonstrates modelling skill, business understanding and the political ability to get honest inputs from the people who own them.
"Improved rolling forecast accuracy from ±9% to ±2.5% by rebuilding the driver-based model and revising the input cadence" also shows you understand that forecasting is a process problem as much as a mathematical one.
- Forecast accuracy or variance to plan, before and after
- Reporting cycle time, before and after
- Revenue, cost base, or capital budget you're responsible for
- Savings or profit identified, with the analysis that found it
- Decisions the model supported — including ones it stopped
The decision you prevented is as good as the one you enabled
Analysts are frequently the reason a bad investment doesn't happen, and this almost never appears on a resume. It should: "ran the business case that stopped a $12M capex proposal, showing a 9-year payback against a 4-year threshold" demonstrates rigour and the willingness to deliver unwelcome news.
That second quality is genuinely scarce, and every finance leader has been burned by its absence. It's worth a bullet even when the outcome was no action at all.
Excel is assumed; name the planning stack
Every applicant claims advanced Excel, so the phrase carries no information. What differentiates is the planning and BI layer: Anaplan, Adaptive, Hyperion, Pigment, Power BI, Tableau, and increasingly SQL.
SQL in particular is a step change in what an analyst can do without asking anyone. If you have it, put it in the skills list and show it once in a bullet — an analysis you ran on raw data rather than on a report somebody else built.
Business partnering means naming the partners
The difference between a reporting analyst and a business partner is whose decisions you're in the room for. Say it concretely: plant leadership, the commercial director, the executive committee, a category team.
Pair it with an outcome that came from that relationship. Presenting variance analysis to plant leadership is a fact; the freight analysis that found $2.3M is what the relationship produced. Both together tell the story.