Financial Analysis interview preparation

The three statements, working capital, ratios, forecasting, variance analysis, costing, capital budgeting, valuation and the modelling and Excel work that fills the day, plus the fit questions about why this seat. Every question is either traced to a named firm from a public candidate report, or tagged at desk level when we could not trace it — we do not invent attributions.

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100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them

Questions
100
Traced to a firm
42
Firms
28
Updated
September 2026
Asked at
All firmsMoody's7Bain Capital3State Street3Ares Management2BlackRock2D.E. Shaw2Morgan Stanley2Oaktree Capital Management2S&P Global2Bridgewater Associates1Citadel1Franklin Templeton1Golub Capital1Harris Williams1Houlihan Lokey1J.P. Morgan1Jane Street1Marshall Wace1Millennium Management1Morningstar1PIMCO1Sycamore Partners1Truist Securities1Two Sigma1Vanguard1Wellington Management1Wells Fargo Securities1Wolverine Trading1
Topic
All topicsThree statements9Accounting policy and standards5Working capital and cash7Ratio analysis8Forecasting and budgeting9Variance and management reporting7Unit economics and costing8Capital budgeting7Cost of capital and valuation7Markets and rates5Modelling, Excel and data8Business partnering6Brainteasers and estimation4Fit and career10
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  1. 020How does GST affect a company's cash flow?Working capital and cashHardtechnicalIndian corporate FP&ATreasury

    Say this

    GST is P&L neutral for a registered business but it is not cash neutral. You pay output GST to the government by the 20th of the following month, and you recover input credit only when your supplier has actually filed. That mismatch parks real cash with the government.

    Then walk it

    1. The mechanics: you collect GST on sales, claim credit on purchases, and pay the difference monthly. Because it is a pass-through, it never touches revenue or cost in the P&L.
    2. The first cash drag is timing. You remit output GST on invoices raised, whether or not the customer has paid you. So on 60-day receivables you are funding the government's tax for roughly a month and a half.
    3. The second is input credit matching. Credit flows only when the supplier's return reflects the invoice. A non-compliant vendor means your credit sits blocked, which is why vendor compliance is now a treasury issue, not just a tax one.
    4. The third is accumulated credit. Exporters and companies with an inverted duty structure build unutilised credit balances and depend on refunds, which take time. For an exporter that balance can be a serious chunk of working capital.
    5. So in a cash forecast I model GST as its own line: output payable, input credit available, net remittance by the 20th, and a separate refund-receivable line with a realistic collection lag. Never net it into revenue.
    6. The practical FP&A action is a monthly reconciliation of GST recoverable in the ledger against the portal, because differences are how companies discover blocked credit six months late.

    Where candidates lose it

    Saying GST has no cash impact because it is a pass-through. Pass-through in the P&L, not in cash. The output-before-collection timing and blocked input credit are the two effects an interviewer is listening for.

    Expect next

    • How would you model GST in a 13-week cash flow?
    • What is an inverted duty structure and who suffers from it?
    • How does finance make vendors comply?

Firm tags come from public, anonymous candidate reports on Wall Street Oasis: strong signal, not sworn testimony. Firms are named as the places a question was reported, not as partners of Fin Maverick. Answers are written for this page to show how to think out loud; they are not scripts to recite.