A Day in the Life of a Tesla Financial Analyst (Bay Area) #Finance

foreign my name is Michael and today I’m going to break down my day in the life as a financial analyst at Tesla let’s get started so to fill you in on my official role I worked as a lead analyst for Tesla’s North America and Pacific Sales and Service infrastructure

href="https://cashnews.co/finance" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance operation I know it’s a really long title and probably an unnecessarily long title it was kind of funny how I was given the lead analyst role just because there was only one other

analyst in China covering China’s sales and service and one analyst in Europe covering Europe so I sort of became the lead analyst just because I was covering the main North America Portfolio in terms of job specifics I pretty much covered the Real Estate

operating expenses and Capital expenditures for anything sales or service related so think your sales stores your service repair shops body repair shops and those kinds of properties in terms of geographic coverage I did the main North America Portfolio which at

the time was about 300 Plus locations in the U.S Canada and Mexico as well as the Pacific Portfolio which included countries like Japan Korea New Zealand and Australia alright so now let’s go through my typical work schedule so I would wake up at around seven if I was working

from home or 6 30 if I was planning to go into the office since it took me about 40 minutes to drive through traffic from my place in Mountain View to the main Factory office in Fremont California and yes I didn’t drive a Tesla i instead drove this wonderful reliable and affordable Honda

Civic sport if I was working from home then I’d usually do a quick banana and oatmeal breakfast but if I was planning to go into the office then I’d usually just eat the free cereal that they had at the cafeteria at around 8 am I would typically start work and I usually wouldn’t

have a meeting before 8 A.M unless there was a really big meeting with a lot of people in which case the only free shared available time was really early in the morning at this time I would usually check my email for any important updates or urgent tasks and I would also look at the updated figures

in my Financial Forecast models I would usually send out emails to relevant business partners for site level details and updates since I normally needed to hear from someone a little closer to the local projects to figure out why certain expenditures were going up or down then

usually once a week we’ll have a team meeting in the morning in my case our team was really small and lean with about six people total at the time I was the most Junior on the team being the only analyst and then we had to senior list one associate one senior associate and one senior manager

in these meetings the senior manager would usually start by providing important updates and highlights and then we would each go around and talk about our segment of the business so someone would talk about new cars someone would talk about used cars then service and body repairs then I’d

normally talk about Real Estate which usually covered things like new property launches and Renovations then following the weekly meeting I would usually have some windows of time to do some Project work or hop on additional calls for my project work I revamped and maintained two

main forecast models one model for operating expenses so I think things like rent and utilities and the other for Capital expenses so think Construction and Equipment for new locations and renovation projects every month I would frequently check for variances investigate issues and

update the forecast model my goal here was to not only just update the forecast model to make it more accurate but to also identify any insightful Trends or patterns that could lead to an actionable business decision for example I could say something like hey I think we’re planning to spend

quite a lot of money on this new location relative to our typical spend are we sure it’s not going to be more cost effective to Simply expand on an existing location nearby instead within this period I would also have some meetings so I might tune into the construction team meeting to review

updates on current projects or I might schedule a call with the utilities analyst for example to figure out why utility bills have been going up in the past few months at around 12 I would usually try to take a lunch break at home or if I was in the office I try to get some lunch with some

colleagues if they weren’t busy with work there were usually food trucks parked outside the Fremont Factory office but they were a little pricey and not too filling so I didn’t eat there too often usually I just hit the microwaves with something basic so a tupperware filled with pasta

or chicken and rice then just after lunch I would try my best to spend as much time as possible completing my project work outside of the two main forecast models that I maintained every month I also worked on other Real Estate oriented Financial models for example I worked on this

new location projection model where I would receive plan spend for a new location for their operating expenses and Capital expenditures and then I would have to compile comparable figures based off of comparable locations to help the managers figure out if this was a reasonable

project from a financial perspective my goal here was to automate the comparison in Excel so that the comparable Figures were automatically calculated based on variables like property type size location new build versus renovation and several other factors in addition to this I also worked on a

Capital expenditures budget versus actuals analysis model here the actual model idea and layout wasn’t very hard but the data quality was the most challenging part about this because there were always certain spend I items that were being classified incorrectly or placed on

the wrong projects so overall if you’re preparing for a role like this I’d say data cleaning and data analysis skills are very very important then at some point in the afternoon I’d usually have a one-on-one meeting with my senior manager where we talked about anything and

everything at the time I was doing a lot of work revamping our Real Estate forecast models so we often talked about that but we also talked about other things like requests from other teams or just general career mentorship then at around four to five I try to take a break from the

financial models and work on the Capital expenditure spend requests that have been stacking up in my inbox here I was responsible for approving the new spend invoices for new construction and renovation projects so for example if a service repair shop in South Korea wanted to spend

some money on additional car lifts and they would submit a Capital expenditure spend requests to be reviewed and approved by me this was an eye-opening experience for me because as a fresh college graduate I didn’t expect to be in such an impactful role in the business on

average I’d say I get about five to ten spend requests per day given that we were growing really rapidly with 350 Plus locations in North America and the Pacific and I’d say on my worst day I had something like 30 spend requests stacked up on my inbox yeah then at around 6 PM I try to

have some dinner by throwing something in the oven and having it with some rice or pasta and some veggies and if I had some extra time I’d usually try to hit the gym then after dinner I’d usually try to finish up some work and respond to a few emails here I would sometimes spend some

time working on some extra reports requested by other teams so for example I might put together a report showing the most efficient locations by output or cost per square foot sometimes these reports would be a bit of a sensitive or touchy subject because a lot of these metrics were being used to

evaluate different Real Estate project managers but in my case I try to just be as fair and logical as possible and I really came to learn that it’s not always about the plain numbers on paper because there are always some unique business circumstances or business objectives

that could explain some outliers in the data then after 10 pm I’d usually try to take it easy wind down and relax by watching some TV with some housemates and I’d usually try to go to bed by around 11 pm all right so that’s my day in the life of a Tesla financial analyst if

you’re currently recruiting for a new job consider checking out this CashNews.co here and as always if you found this CashNews.co useful please give us a like And subscribe and stay tuned for more CashNews.cos