Budget Analyst

☛ How do you relate with program administrators and financial personnel?

☛ Do you compile and share monthly data involving income, investment, sales forecasting, shipments and cash flow reports?

☛ What long range plans have you implemented for the firm?

☛ Are your accounting and knowledge of financial systems abilities used to integrate profit/loss reports?

☛ Have you been responsible for maintaining a financial system database?

☛ Have you ever prepared work force reviews?

The employer wants to know how much courage and persuasion you have. Think of a time when you persuaded someone or a group to follow your lead to a successful end. Your experience might have been around a serious business matter, or maybe even a personal interaction that turned into a humorous tale.

☛ Tell me about a time you made a suggestion that resulted in a significant spending cut

☛ Recall a time you had to defend a budget recommendation to a demanding executive. Was the recommendation approved in the end?

☛ Describe a time when you had to present a budget recommendation to an multi-disciplinary audience. How did you make yourself understood to all of them?

☛ Give me an example of a time you used financial information to solve a problem

☛ Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a department’s manager over budget

☛ Walk me through the process of preparing a budget

☛ Tell me how you go about preparing a forecasting report

☛ When reviewing a funding request, what kind of information do you need?

☛ Imagine an executive tells you there’s some inconsistency between approved budget and actual expenditure at a department. What do you do?

☛ If you had to prepare several budget at the same time, how would you prioritize?

☛ Have you ever had to deal with conflicting deadlines?

☛ What parts of your education do you see as relevant to this Budget Analyst position?

☛ Do you think that your school prepared for practical working tasks in a real company?

☛ Do you work better under pressure or with time to plan and organize?

☛ Why do you feel you're qualified for this Budget Analyst job?

☛ What type of work environment do you prefer?

☛ What is your greatest achievement outside of work?

☛ Tell me about your experience with cost-benefit analysis

☛ How would you rate your data analysis skills, on a scale of 1 to 10?

☛ Do you think the job of a budget analyst requires teamwork? Why?

☛ How do you maintain attention to detail when preparing a budget?

☛ What is your greatest fear?

☛ How well did your college experience prepare you for this Budget Analyst job?

☛ Did you have faults as a leader? Describe the situation.

☛ What's your ideal company?

☛ Give an example of a time you successfully worked as Budget Analyst on a team.

☛ Why did you leave your last job.

☛ What was the most important task you ever had?

Prepare and articulate your goals, and remain honest here. Focus on yourself and your talents, not other people's flaws.

The response to this question usually reveals if the candidate has personal or professional goals.

☛ Have you ever challenged, shaken old work methods.

☛ What salary range are you looking for?

☛ How would you describe the experience of working as Budget Analyst?

☛ Describe a group project of which you are particularly proud, what was your contribution?

☛ When you are not studying or working, what types of activities do you enjoy?

☛ Give examples of steps taken to make each team member feel important.

☛ How do you see your job relating to the overall goals?

In most cases, budget analysts work for large corporations or universities in which there are multiple departments associated with spending. Because of this, you may be required to budget the entire corporation or university—or sometimes a group of departments—rather than just a single department. To answer this question, you may say “I am extremely capable of reviewing budgets for multiple departments and creating not only an overall budget, but a specific budget for each department that is geared toward meeting the company’s overall financial goals.”

Conflict resolution is a valuable skill. With downsizing, mergers, and problems in corporate management, this could be your winning ticket. Put yourself in the interviewer’s shoes to know what interpersonal issues are current stumbling blocks at the company. Then come up with an experience of your own that parallels the company’s.

Transposing numbers. Had them corrected immediately.

Alternate flow are the alternative actions that can be performed apart for the basic flow and might be considered as an optional flow whereas Exception flow is the path traversed in case of the error or an exception being thrown. For e.g. on a logic page the ‘Forgot password’ is the alternate flow and system showing ‘404 error’ when correct username and password are entered is exception flow.

Here’s your chance to look good by talking about one of your favorite achievements. While telling your story, keep in mind what tasks you might be asked to perform at the job you’re applying for and highlight anything in your story that relates to your next job.

Through the course of a project, a BA is constantly striving to help technology achieve the business requirements and in this pursuit he prepares a number of documents. They are :

☛ Project vision document

☛ Requirement Management Plan

☛ Use cases

☛ User stories

☛ Business Requirement Document

☛ Requirement traceability matrix (RTM)

☛ Functional requirement specification (FRS)/ Functional Specification Document (FSD)

☛ System requirement specification (SRS)/ System Requirement Document (SRD)

☛ Test case

Interviewers often ask this question to ascertain your work experience, how you handle multiple things and your perception about the job.

You should stress upon depicting that there is no typical day for a BA and how varied your work is, through the day. Show your rich experience by explaining how you responds to the emails, meeting with the subject matter experts, clarification of the business flow to the technical team, discussion with the project manager over the project status, preparation and review of functional documents.