Director of Financial Planning & Analysis

Job Description

Job Description

For more than 80 years, Case Paper has been a family-owned, privately held distributor and custom converter of paper and paperboard, supplying the printing and packaging industries from seven distribution centers across the country. We convert more paper and board than almost any other company in the United States — slitting, sheeting, and cutting to specification for customers in signage, direct mail, cosmetics, food, personal care, and technology packaging.

We have grown by staying close to our customers and by holding to something simple: people come first. That applies to the customers who rely on us, the communities we operate in, and the people who work here. We are large enough to matter in our industry and small enough that one person’s analysis can change what the company does next.

Our accounting team establishes what happened and certifies that it is correct. This role owns what happens next — the forecasting, modeling, margin strategy, and long-range planning that determine where we invest, what we sell, and how we grow.

The most visible part of that work is commercial. You will be the analytical partner to our Chief Commercial Officer and sales leadership on margin, pricing, mix, and customer and product profitability, turning data into pricing discipline and profitable growth. The second is executive decision support: defining our KPI framework and delivering the analysis behind capital, pricing, and strategic decisions with a recommendation attached — not just numbers.

You will report to our VP of Finance & Administration, who manages your goals, priorities, and day-to-day. Strategic matters run on a dotted line straight to our President, who is the primary consumer of this work and holds a standing weekly with it.

You are the FP&A function. You will pull your own data, build your own models, and produce your own analysis. If you have been the person everyone comes to because you can actually get the number out of the system and explain what it means, it may be exactly that role.

• Own the annual operating budget and the rolling 12-month forecast — revenue, margin, expense, and headcount.
• Build and maintain our core financial model, with scenario and sensitivity analysis for volume shifts, price movement, cost inflation, and market disruption.
• Own monthly P&L analysis and variance against budget and forecast, explaining the drivers — price, volume, mix, material, labor efficiency, equipment utilization, quality, freight, and overhead — rather than restating them.
• Review P&Ls by site with the leadership team, and surface risks and early warning indicators before they land in results.

• Partner with sales leadership on margin performance, pricing strategy, and quote and bid support.
• Find and quantify margin leakage across pricing, mix, rebates, freight, terms, and inventory — and drive the fix to completion.
• Own customer, product, channel, and facility profitability, and identify unprofitable products, customers, and cost structures.
• Build the tools and guardrails that let sales make faster, better-informed pricing decisions on their own.

• Lead the multi-year strategic and financial planning process.
• Maintain a 3–5 year model covering growth, capacity, capital needs, and infrastructure.
• Frame strategic options for the President and ownership with the risks, trade-offs, and expected returns made explicit.
• Model capital projects, facility decisions, acquisitions, and major customer opportunities — and bring a recommendation with each.

• Independently extract, clean, reconcile, and validate data from AS/400, Lansa, and other fragmented sources using advanced Excel, SQL, Power BI, and AI-enabled tools.
• Define our KPI framework and own the monthly executive performance package.
• Build dashboards and self-service reporting so leaders can see their own drivers without having to ask.
• Serve as a key finance participant in our ERP implementation, anticipated in 27/28 — data mapping, chart of accounts design, reporting structure, testing, and reconciliation.

• Establish the model library, reporting calendar, and analytical standards from scratch.
• Document every recurring model and report, so no analysis lives only in one person’s head.
• Reduce the time spent moving data and increase the time spent interpreting it.

AS/400 (IBM i) with Lansa is our system of record. Reporting runs through Excel, supported by SQL, Power BI, and AI-enabled tools. The data environment is legacy and imperfect — getting to a defensible number takes real work, and doing that work independently is the core of this role.

• A rolling forecast delivered on schedule and accurate enough that leadership plans against it with confidence.
• Margin that measurably improves because of leakage you found and decisions you framed.
• A sales organization that comes to you first, because analysis comes back in days rather than weeks.
• One set of numbers the whole company trusts, packaged monthly, that nobody has to re-check.
• A long-range plan with real scenarios behind it, refreshed as the market moves.
• An FP&A function that would survive your absence, because you wrote down how it works.

• Bachelor’s degree in finance, accounting, economics, or business administration.
• Eight or more years in financial planning and analysis, corporate finance, or strategic finance.
• Experience as the senior-most FP&A resource for a business or business unit — not one contributor inside a larger department.
• Ownership of budgeting, forecasting, and multi-year financial modeling for a full business.
• A track record partnering with a sales or commercial organization on pricing, margin, and profitability, with measurable results.
• Advanced Excel — pivot tables, complex formulas, financial modeling — built personally and from scratch.
• Working knowledge of SQL or Power BI, with the ability to query, join, and validate datasets without support.
• Demonstrated experience with legacy, fragmented, or weak systems, and the judgment to reach a defensible answer from imperfect data.
• Proven success working remotely at a senior level, with the self-direction that requires.
• The ability to explain financial results in operational terms to non-financial audiences.

• Paper, board, packaging, or converting industry experience.
• Manufacturing and/or distribution background, including cost accounting.
• Hands-on experience with AS/400 (IBM i), Lansa, or comparable legacy platforms.
• Experience standing up a reporting or BI layer where none existed.
• Practical use of AI-enabled tools to accelerate analysis, reporting, and research.
• Involvement in an ERP selection, implementation, or major system conversion.
• Experience in a privately held or family-owned business where structure is still being built.
• MBA, CPA, or CMA.

• Business judgment.  You produce a recommendation, not a spreadsheet. You know which analysis matters and which is noise.
• Comfort with ambiguity.  You can say what is known, what is estimated, and how much the difference matters — and still reach a conclusion.
• Operational curiosity.  You walk the plant, talk to salespeople, and question the data before defending it.
• Intellectual honesty.  You separate fact from assumption and bring bad news early and unprompted.
• Self-direction.  You set your own agenda and stay visible to the organization without being in the building.

This role is 100% remote with periodic travel, a standing weekly with the President, a seat in the leadership meeting, standing time with our commercial, operations, and supply chain leaders, and visits to all four of our locations in your first 180 days.