NGO Financial Analyst Job Responsibilities

By: Tonya Mead, PhD, MBA, M.Ed, Corporate Trainer and Behavioral Scientist

The job responsibilities of an NGO (nongovernmental) financial analyst is similar to those of a NGO accountant. However, the key difference between the two jobs is that the financial analyst emphasizes job tasks to analyze past and current investment decisions while the NGO accountant focuses on job tasks to review the organization’s past financial performance on a day-to-day basis.

Other related NGO job responsibilities:

The salary for a NGO financial analyst tends to trend higher than the salary of a NGO accountant. The job search website, Indeed.com estimates that the average salary (in the US) for accountants approximates about $55,000 annually while the national average salary (in the US) for financial analysts is about one-third higher, or $72,000.

NGO Financial Analyst Job Responsibilities

What are the typical daily tasks and responsibilities of a NGO financial analyst? Financial analysts, unlike their accountant colleagues are always in search for investment opportunities. They use financial data, economic statistics, forecast modeling, market analysis, demographic trends, and strategic planning to do so. You will generally find a financial analyst working in the Strategic Planning Department reporting to one of the C-Suite officers (Chief Financial Officer, Chief Investment Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Strategic Planning Officer, Chief Operations Officer, or Chief Human Resources Officer). On the other hand, the accountant will most likely be situated in the finance or accounting department.

NGO Financial Analyst Job Responsibilities

  • Prepare, analyze and present monthly financial, operational, monitoring and evaluation data, and forecasting models,
  • Compare past performance with current performance and project upon anticipated future performance given several environmental market conditions,
  • Calculate and present analytics (that runs across business units) to drive top level decision-making,
  • Maintain, clean, transform, reconcile and report upon various data elements (financial and operational) stored in databases and posted to data dashboards,
  • Maintain a working knowledge the critical elements of each core business unit
  • Collaborate with multiple departments across the organization to collect data
  • Ensure the data is of high quality, available, accessible, and reliable,
  • Help to build, test, and maintain monitoring and evaluation dashboards,
  • Conduct studies for use in fund/business development, marketing, strategic planning, and financial planning,
  • Assist with building, testing, and maintenance of various monitoring dashboards,
  • Establish investment and donor criteria for resource planning and allocation,
  • Evaluate externally generated financial statements, financial history and conduct a market analysis to determine the feasibility of the provision or restriction or reallocation of capital for investment and funding purposes,
  • Prepare reports and present to the Board.