You are the FP&A analyst at a B2B industrial distributor. April close is done and the commercial team is in a good mood: revenue came in ahead of budget and it is the strongest month of the year so far. EBITDA did not follow it.
The CFO wants to know, before Thursday's board pack goes out, whether April was a good month that cost something, or a bad month wearing a good month's clothes.
| Line | Budget | Actual | Var |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | €3,600k | €3,780k | +€180k |
| Gross profit | €864k | €812k | −€52k |
| Gross margin | 24.00% | 21.48% | −2.52pp |
| Warehouse & logistics | €280k | €298k | +€18k |
| Sales & account management | €240k | €254k | +€14k |
| Admin & IT | €130k | €156k | +€26k |
| Facilities | €50k | €53k | +€3k |
| EBITDA | €164k | €51k | −€113k |
| Order lines shipped | 18,400 | 20,950 | +2,550 |
| Average order value | €195.70 | €180.40 | −€15.30 |
| On-time-in-full | 96.0% | 94.2% | −1.8pp |
Revenue beat plan by 5%. Order lines beat plan by 14%. Those two numbers do not describe the same month.
Analyse the variances, identify what actually drove them, and update the May outlook. Work in your own spreadsheet — the full data pack is below: GL account detail with owners, revenue by week × channel, client-level revenue for the channel that moved, and 4-month trend.
Your submission — four parts:
1. EBITDA bridge — max 5 lines, from budget €164k to actual €51k.
2. Investigation findings — 3–6 bullets. Separate what the data proves from what remains unresolved.
3. CFO commentary — what you'd actually send. Guide: 150–300 words; a CFO must read all of it. Conciseness is graded, not enforced.
4. May forecast impact — the adjustments and risks you'd flag for next month's forecast, quantified where the evidence allows, each labeled: confirmed / likely / needs confirmation.
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5 messages from the business. Some of it matters. Some of it doesn't. One source is right, wrong and useful in three different messages.
Strong month. We closed 5% ahead of budget and Halverson took a large consumables order in the back half, which is exactly the account we said we'd grow this year. Team hit the Q2 opening target. I'd flag it as a win in the board pack.
Halverson's purchasing lead came back to me after the April order. He reckons their year-to-date volume has taken them past the next tier on the rebate scale and wants that reflected. Kestrel asked something similar the week before. Can you check what tier we have actually been accruing at this year? I told him I'd come back to him Friday.
Outbound freight came in over. Nothing broke; we just shipped a lot more order lines than planned and they were smaller drops than usual, so cost per line went up. If the consumables volume is the new normal I'd want the freight budget revisited.
Confirming the annual ERP licence renewal was invoiced in April. It sits against a May budget line — procurement agreed the earlier date with the vendor. Total project spend is unchanged and May will be light by the same amount.
One more thing for context. A competitor has been pricing aggressively on consumables since February and we've had to meet them in places. I'd expect that to be most of any margin movement you're seeing.
The same weighted rubric as Case 01, applied by a reviewer calibrated on real FP&A management standards:
Hard caps: an EBITDA bridge that doesn't reconcile caps the total score at 60/100, regardless of everything else. Investigating immaterial lines costs marks — knowing what NOT to analyse is part of the job.
You'll get a graded review against the rubric — dimension scores, what you caught, what you missed — within 24 hours.
Submit for grading →This case went live today. It has been validated line by line — the GL ties to the P&L, weekly revenue sums to the month, the bridge reconciles to the cent — but validation is not the same as knowing whether it works on a real person.
So it is free, and what we want back is one email. Not a testimonial — the useful version:
Three sentences is plenty. It goes straight to the person who built it.
✅ Got it — thank you. This genuinely changes what gets built next.
Didn't send — email hello@fpacareerlab.com instead and it'll reach the same place.
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