r/FPandA: rules, karma requirements and posting culture

Who posts here

Posts assume you work in or near corporate finance. People write SFA, YoE, F500, EPM and three statement model without explaining them, and state their title, years of experience and pay as a matter of course. Career changers from audit, tax and accounting do get answers. Entry-level and internship questions are where the moderator removals cluster, so a question pitched at student level may not stay up.

• Financial analysts and senior financial analysts weighing an offer, a promotion or a move.
• FP&A managers and directors asking about scope, strategy, burnout and whether the next level is worth it.
• Accountants and auditors trying to move across into FP&A.
• Finance systems people and team leads comparing planning tools and how they use AI in spreadsheets.
• Students and recent graduates, who post often and are removed often.

Karma and account requirements

What it takes to get a post through in r/FPandA.

What you can post

What happens to a new post

Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.

• Stayed up51%
• Removed by Reddit's filters2%
• Held by AutoModerator2%
• Removed by moderators43%
• Deleted by the author2%

Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.

The rules, in the mods' words

1. 1

   No low effort posts

   Share ideas and insights or ask thoughtful questions related to FP&A. Please refrain from posting generic news items or topics that are better suited for other subs.

2. 2

   Keep discussions civil, informative and polite.

   Off topic comments, attacks or insults will not be tolerated. We recognize that this forum will generate differences of opinion, or misunderstandings of facts, and therefore arguments are expected. However, personal attacks, insults, trolling, or accounts dedicated to getting under the skin of others is not allowed, and will be banned.

3. 3

   Strictly no (self-)promotion or solicitation threads or spam.

   Violating this rule results in an automatic permanent ban. Do not post your YouTube, twitter, discord, app, tool, blog, referral code, event, survey, etc. We generally expect that people who come here are not using the forum to build a brand, generate clicks, or shill. Posts that are strictly self-interested or intended to "build awareness" are not acceptable.

4. 4

   Original Sourcing: articles posted must be from the original source on a best efforts basis

   This means if CNBC is reporting on something WSJ reported on we expect you to post the original article. If anyone is writing an article based on a FP&A/Business news release/white paper post the actual paper and not journalism surrounding it. Provide the link to the source article or paper. This rule will be more strictly enforced based on how clickbaity an article is.

5. 5

   Ethics

   While no advice or credentials of those giving advice have been verified or endorsed, any blatant violations of ethical rules are not tolerated.

These are the rules as archived in January 2025. Rules change. Check the sidebar before you post.

The culture

r/FPandA is a professional room for people who build budgets and forecasts for a living. About 94% of posts are text, the median post gets 18 comments, and 40% of titles are questions. For a subreddit of 75,000 the threads are active, and the replies come from people who state their level and speak from it.

Careers dominate. The most common subjects are whether to take an offer, how to get from analyst to manager to director, what remote work is worth, and how to move in from audit or accounting. Alongside that sits the work itself: untangling an inherited forecast model, dirty data that never gets fixed at the source, choosing a planning tool, what to do when a boss demands AI for everything. The highest-scoring recent posts were shared grievances, like the yearly ritual of sales and the CEO haggling over a revenue target, a toast to budget season, and a one-line admission of burnout.

The surprise is the moderation. Roughly half of posts stay up, and nearly all of the rest are removed by moderators by hand, not by filters. The removed posts in our sample lean toward internships, graduate roles, interview questions about a named employer, job listings and broad what next questions, plus a few that read like vendor content. But some ordinary career questions were removed while similar ones stayed, so the line is not fully visible from outside.

What lands

• A complaint every practitioner recognises, told with specifics, such as the back and forth between a sales team's bottom-up number and what the CEO wanted all along.
• A short, wry post timed to the planning calendar.
• A real decision with the numbers in it: title, years of experience, compensation, team size, what each option changes.
• A working problem described concretely, like whether to rebuild or keep patching a model nobody documented.
• A report from the other side of a move, for example how someone got from audit into a senior analyst seat and what helped.

What gets removed or ignored

• Internship and graduate-role posts, and bare how do I get a job in FP&A questions. These were the largest group of moderator removals in our sample.
• Posts asking about the interview process or a role at a specific named company.
• Job listings and hiring announcements.
• Posts that read like vendor content, such as a list of patterns a product category catches or a leading question about using AI to fix a finance metric.
• Low-effort titles and duplicates. The same question posted twice was removed both times.

The unwritten rules

• State your level. Title, years of experience, industry and company size are the first things readers look for, and comp numbers are normal.
• Humour is dry and aimed at the job. Posts that vent land better than posts that teach.
• Zero comments in our sample carried a link. People name tools in plain text, and a link in a comment would stand out at once.
• AI is discussed as a daily tool with mixed feelings. Posts about how you use it in a spreadsheet stay up. Posts that steer toward a product do not.
• If a career post is removed, it may not be something you did wrong. A large share are pulled, and the rules give the moderators wide room under low effort and off topic.

Self-promotion

The rule is blunt: strictly no self-promotion or solicitation, and violating it results in an automatic permanent ban. It names YouTube, Twitter, Discord, apps, tools, blogs, referral codes, events and surveys, and says posts meant to build awareness are not acceptable. In practice the evidence matches the rule. No sampled comment contained a link, and posts that looked like vendor thought leadership were removed. A few research-style questions from people building something did stay up, but that is a risk with a permanent ban on the other side. Take part as a practitioner or not at all.

How people write here

Typical post length

118 words

Typical title length

7 words

Titles phrased as a question

40%

Typical comment length

23 words

Comments that include a link

0%

The regulars

The accounts that showed up most in our sample. Worth reading before you post: they set the tone, and they are usually the first to reply.

Top keywords

The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/FPandA.

• finance 83 posts
• analyst 72 posts
• financial analyst 31 posts
• role 81 posts
• financial 56 posts
• career 55 posts
• manager 54 posts
• company 76 posts
• senior 39 posts
• forecasting 23 posts
• roles 40 posts
• sfa 13 posts
• accounting 33 posts
• director 24 posts
• job 63 posts
• resume 27 posts
• reporting 27 posts
• interview 31 posts
• excel 22 posts
• senior financial 8 posts
• analyst role 12 posts
• experience 61 posts
• yoe 16 posts
• position 30 posts
• team 45 posts
• analysis 25 posts
• current 42 posts
• modeling 12 posts
• recruiter 15 posts
• level 30 posts
• transition 19 posts
• finance roles 8 posts
• fpa 7 posts
• forecast 12 posts
• commercial finance 6 posts
• f500 8 posts
• analyst roles 8 posts
• background 25 posts
• finance role 6 posts
• remote 24 posts

Posts that did well

• Fed up of the revenue target dance253 upvotes · 45 comments
• Raising a glass to budget season!142 upvotes · 31 comments
• Jesus christ, its just days like these endlessly until retirement134 upvotes · 51 comments
• I just reached my 4-year anniversary after job hopping 11 jobs over 7 years. AMA84 upvotes · 94 comments
• Manager level - how to be more strategic71 upvotes · 18 comments
• Immaterial under Accounting Boss vs Finance Boss69 upvotes · 28 comments
• Boss: MORE AI, MORE AI, MORE AI67 upvotes · 38 comments
• Is negotiating your compensation package out of the norm now?66 upvotes · 41 comments

Common questions