As the CFO shifts from Chief Financial Officer to Chief Performance Officer, so to do the expectations, and resulting pay, for those working within the finance function. Gone are the days of FP&A being “just a budgeting team.”
At a private company, in general, the best way to think about cash comp is that as a company gets larger, the floor you start at gets a little bit higher, since the company has ostensibly reached product market fit, achieved some level of commercial success, and now has funding to attract top talent with increasingly specific skillsets.
This post covers cash compensation, or base salary + annual bonus. What’s not factored in is equity compensation, which will be covered in a separate discussion (or if you’re in a rush, you can become a paying subscriber of the newsletter and we’ll benchmark it for you).
Below you’ll find the most recent ranges (High, Medium, Low) for private tech company cash comp (Salary + Annual Bonus), spanning firms valued from $25M to +$1B for the following roles:
Entry Level Financial Analyst
Senior Financial Analyst
Finance Manager
Senior Finance Manager
Finance Director
Senior Finance Director
VP of Finance
CFO
Data is sourced from surveyed Mostly metrics readers, Reddit, Pave, LinkedIn job postings, and my own experiential knowledge. It incorporates thousands of data points, which we’ve smoothed using our own formulas.
Entry Level Financial Analyst
Mostly observations: This can be viewed as an “entry level” gig for someone graduating from college with a bachelors in finance or accounting. Unlike the roles we’ll discuss below, comp for entry level financial analysts has moved the least in the past 10 years.
Senior Financial Analyst
Mostly observations: For someone early in their career, this position can see up to a 100% increase from the junior financial analyst role, within just 4 years of graduating from college.
This position can typically acheve the higher ends of the range, and in a shorter timeframe, if someone does their first ~18 months in either investment banking or consulting, and then makes the shift to an operating role.
Finance Manager
Mostly observations: In recent years, there’s been a proliferation of “finance managers” who only manage a process, not people.
This is a clever way to pay a Senior Analyst more, who’s been in a seat for a while, without putting people under them.
Manager (of a process) is also a common entry point for Investment Bankers or Consultants with four or more years of experience and make a change.
Senior Finance Manager
Mostly observations: This role has seen a decrease in frequency over the past few years, with more people landing on either the Manager or Director side of the fence at SaaS companies, squeezing out the middle point.
Finance Director
Mostly observations: This is a common entry point within finance tech departments for people graduating from an MBA program.
Senior Finance Director
Mostly observations: There has been an increase in Senior Finance Directors within Tech who do not manage any people, but are “expert” individual contributors.
This was not the case ten years ago, but is now common at pre IPO companies looking for specialists (e.g., Investor Relations, Treasury).
VP of Finance
Mostly observations: VPs of Finance aren’t seeing pay bands drastically higher than that of Senior Finance Directors, but usually see increased equity upside (which is not shown here, but up to 3x higher).
CFO
Mostly observations: It’s common to see series B through C startups offering $225 to $250K base, plus bonus to CFOs.
Another trend is CFOs in the growth equity range who are taking lower cash packages (e.g., low $200K + bonus) in favor of more equity (e.g., 1.25% to 1.5% fully diluted).
