01
How do you validate data before analysis?
Show answer
Check row counts against the source, nulls, duplicates on keys, value ranges, date coverage and that totals reconcile with finance reports.
EY Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers
Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About EY hiring for Business Analytics roles
EY is one of the Big Four professional services networks, offering assurance, tax, strategy and transactions, and consulting services. In India, EY GDS and EY member firms support global clients with technology consulting, data analytics, cybersecurity and risk work. It hires for analyst and consultant roles in data analytics, BI, testing, ERP and risk.
For Business Analytics roles, this EY practice set focuses most on Excel for Business Analysts (7), SQL for Business Analysis (6), Stakeholder Communication (6), Case Studies and Guesstimates (5). It has 7 easy, 31 medium, 2 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
- Company type
- Consulting
- Headquarters
- London, United Kingdom
- Main India offices
- Bengaluru, Kolkata, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Kochi
EY Business Analytics interview process
- Online assessment (aptitude + technical)
- Technical interview
- Managerial or case round
- Partner or HR round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
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02
A business head wants 25 charts on one dashboard page. How do you respond?
Show answer
Ask what decisions they make weekly and which three to five KPIs drive them. Propose a summary page with those KPIs, trends and one breakdown, then drill-through or separate pages for detail. Show a quick mock-up of both versions so they see the clutter and the load time. Use bookmarks or a field parameter to let them switch views without adding charts. Agree on the layout before building.
03
What is the profit equation and how do you use it in cases?
Show answer
Profit = Revenue minus Cost, where revenue = price x volume and cost = fixed + variable. Split each part to find which one explains a change.
04
Tell me about a time you said no to a stakeholder.
Show answer
Situation: a regional manager wanted a custom report changed daily, which would have taken half my week. Task: support him without blocking other priorities. Action: I asked which decisions the report fed and found he needed only four numbers. I said no to the custom version, explained the impact on other work, and added those four metrics with a filter to the existing dashboard. Result: he got his numbers the same day and the team kept its capacity.
05
How do you handle large datasets in Excel?
Show answer
Use tables, Power Query, remove volatile functions, filter before calculating and move to Power Pivot or a database when rows reach the millions.
06
Write an Excel formula that lists all North region orders above 50,000 rupees.
Show answer
=FILTER(Orders[[OrderID]:[Amount]],
(Orders[Region]="North") * (Orders[Amount]>50000),
"No matching orders")
# Multiplying the two conditions acts as AND.
# Use + instead of * for OR logic.
# Wrap with SORT(..., 3, -1) to sort by the third column descending.
07
How would you estimate the market size for an electric scooter in India?
Show answer
Top-down: two-wheeler market x EV share x addressable segment. Bottom-up: target households x adoption rate x price. Compare both for a sanity check.
08
What is a stakeholder analysis?
Show answer
Identifying everyone affected by the project and mapping their influence and interest to decide how to communicate with and involve each group.
09
A stakeholder asks for a detailed report by tomorrow, but it realistically needs a week. What do you do?
Show answer
Understand the real need first: what decision is it for and what is the minimum that helps tomorrow? Offer a phased answer, such as a quick directional view with the top three numbers tomorrow, clearly labelled with caveats, and the full validated report in a week. Explain the trade-off between speed and accuracy. Confirm the agreed plan in writing so expectations are clear.
10
Your project is going to miss its deadline by two weeks. How do you communicate this?
Show answer
Tell the sponsor and key stakeholders as soon as you are confident, not on the deadline. Be direct about the delay, the cause and the impact. Come with options, such as reducing scope to hit the date, adding resources, or moving the date with a phased release, plus your recommendation. Agree on the new plan, update the communication plan and track the recovery visibly.
11
Write an Excel formula for the NPV of a project with an initial investment today and five yearly cash inflows.
Show answer
# B1 = discount rate (for example 12%)
# B2 = initial investment entered as a negative number
# B3:B7 = cash inflows for years 1 to 5
=NPV(B1, B3:B7) + B2
# NPV() assumes the first value comes at the end of year 1,
# so the year-0 investment is added outside the function.
12
Describe a time you led the requirements phase of a large project.
Show answer
Situation: our company was replacing its loan origination system across five business units. Task: lead requirements with two other BAs in three months. Action: I set up a stakeholder map, ran structured workshops per unit, used shared templates and a traceability matrix, and held weekly review checkpoints with the sponsor to resolve conflicts quickly. Result: requirements were signed off on time, change requests in build stayed low, and the template was reused for later projects.
13
The totals in your Excel report differ from the finance system by a few rupees. What could cause this?
Show answer
Usually rounding. Excel may display rounded values while summing the full-precision numbers, or line items were rounded individually in the source system and the total was computed differently. Check whether finance rounds each invoice line before summing, and apply ROUND at the same level in Excel. Other causes include floating-point artifacts, values stored as text being skipped by SUM, or hidden filtered rows. Agree and document one rounding rule with finance.
14
Gross margin fell from 38 percent to 34 percent in one quarter. How do you investigate?
Show answer
Break the change into drivers. Price: were discounts or promotions deeper? Mix: did sales shift towards lower-margin products, channels or regions? Cost: did raw material, freight or supplier prices rise, or did currency movements raise import costs? Also check one-offs like inventory write-offs and accounting reclassifications. Build a margin bridge showing how many percentage points each driver contributed, then take the biggest driver to the business owner with a specific action.
15
How do you calculate monthly revenue growth in SQL?
Show answer
Aggregate revenue per month and use LAG(revenue) OVER (ORDER BY month) to compute (revenue - previous) / previous.
16
Your LEFT JOIN report should list all customers, but customers without orders are missing. Why?
Show answer
A condition on the right table was probably placed in the WHERE clause, for example WHERE o.order_date >= '2026-01-01'. For customers with no orders, o.order_date is NULL, so WHERE removes them and the query behaves like an INNER JOIN. Move the condition into the ON clause, as in LEFT JOIN orders o ON o.customer_id = c.id AND o.order_date >= '2026-01-01', or explicitly allow NULLs.
17
Push notifications increased weekly engagement, but app uninstalls also rose. What do you recommend?
Show answer
Quantify both effects: extra sessions and revenue from notifications versus users lost through uninstalls and notification opt-outs, including their lifetime value. Segment by notification type and frequency to find which ones annoy users. Recommend frequency caps, personalised timing, relevance rules and easy preference settings, then test them with uninstall rate and opt-out rate as guardrails. Short-term engagement should not cost long-term users.
18
How do you calculate the percentage contribution of each category?
Show answer
SUM(sales) per category divided by SUM(SUM(sales)) OVER () and multiplied by 100 gives each category's share of the total.
19
Explain Porter's Five Forces.
Show answer
A model assessing industry attractiveness through supplier power, buyer power, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes and rivalry among competitors.
20
How do you find duplicate customers?
Show answer
SELECT email, COUNT(*) FROM customers GROUP BY email HAVING COUNT(*) > 1;
21
After a redesign, average time spent in the app increased. Is that good?
Show answer
It depends on the product's goal. For a content or learning app, more time may mean more engagement. For a payments or banking app, more time can mean users struggle to complete tasks. Check task completion rate, time to complete key actions, errors, support tickets and retention. A metric is good only when it moves in line with the value users came for.
22
What is the difference between capex and opex?
Show answer
Capex (capital expenditure) is spending on long-term assets that benefit several years, such as machinery, buildings or capitalised software development. It goes on the balance sheet and is expensed gradually through depreciation or amortisation. Opex (operating expenditure) covers day-to-day running costs such as salaries, rent and cloud subscriptions, and is expensed in the period it occurs. Moving from owned servers to cloud services shifts IT spending from capex to opex, which changes how budgets and business cases look.
23
What is a product backlog vs a sprint backlog?
Show answer
The product backlog is the ordered list of all desired work; the sprint backlog is the subset the team commits to in the current sprint.
24
Tell me about a time careful listening helped you uncover a hidden requirement.
Show answer
Situation: during interviews for a new order system, a warehouse supervisor kept mentioning that Friday evenings were chaotic. Task: understand whether this mattered for the requirements. Action: instead of moving on, I asked what happened on Fridays and learned that bulk orders were split manually because of truck capacity limits. Result: we added an automatic order-splitting rule that nobody had listed, which saved the team about four hours a week and avoided a likely UAT failure.
25
How is a product owner's role different from a business analyst's role?
Show answer
The product owner owns the product vision and the backlog order, makes final priority decisions and accepts completed work on behalf of the business. The business analyst works on understanding problems in depth: eliciting and analysing requirements, modelling processes and data, writing detailed stories and acceptance criteria and supporting the team and testers. In smaller teams one person may do both, but the PO decides what, while the BA clarifies how it should work.
26
A feature launched two months ago is used by only 4 percent of users. What would you do?
Show answer
Find out whether it is a discovery problem or a value problem. Check how many users saw the entry point, how many tried it and how many returned. If few saw it, test better placement or onboarding prompts. If many tried and few returned, interview users and review session recordings to understand why. Also check if the 4 percent are high-value users. Then decide to improve, reposition or remove it.
27
Write a SQL query to calculate the repeat purchase rate.
Show answer
WITH per_customer AS (
SELECT customer_id, COUNT(DISTINCT order_id) AS orders
FROM orders
GROUP BY customer_id
)
SELECT
ROUND(100.0 * SUM(CASE WHEN orders >= 2 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)
/ COUNT(*), 2) AS repeat_rate_pct
FROM per_customer;
28
What is a process flow and which tools do you use?
Show answer
A diagram of steps, decisions and owners in a process, made using BPMN or flowcharts in tools like Visio, Lucidchart or draw.io.
29
How do you build a forecast in Excel?
Show answer
Use historical data with FORECAST.ETS or trend lines, state assumptions, compare against actuals and show best, base and worst scenarios.
30
How do you calculate cycle time, touch time and process efficiency? Give an example.
Show answer
Cycle time (lead time) is the total elapsed time from the start to the end of a case. Touch time is the time someone actually works on it. Process cycle efficiency is touch time divided by cycle time. Example: a refund takes 5 working days (40 working hours) end to end, but the agents spend only 2 hours in total working on it. Efficiency is 2 / 40 = 5 percent, so 95 percent of the time is waiting, and queues are the main target.
31
What is Agile and how does Scrum work?
Show answer
Agile delivers value in small increments with feedback. Scrum organises work in sprints with planning, daily stand-ups, review and retrospective, led by a Scrum Master and Product Owner.
32
UAT starts tomorrow, but the business has not nominated any testers. What do you do?
Show answer
Escalate immediately to the business sponsor with the impact: each day without testers delays sign-off and go-live. Ask for named testers with protected time, even part-time. Meanwhile, prepare so no time is lost: finalise test cases, check the environment and data, and plan a short tester briefing. If testers cannot be released, propose re-planning UAT dates rather than letting IT or the BA test on the business's behalf, because acceptance must come from the users.
33
How do you write an effective executive summary for an analysis report?
Show answer
Put it first and keep it to one page or five lines on a slide. Start with the answer or recommendation, then the two or three key findings that support it, each with a number, then the impact in rupees or percentage, and finally the decision or action needed and by when. Avoid methodology details, which go in the appendix. Test it by asking whether a busy leader could act after reading only this section.
34
A lookup formula returns #N/A for some rows even though the values look present. What could be wrong?
Show answer
Usually the values only look the same. Common causes are trailing or leading spaces, numbers stored as text in one sheet and as numbers in the other, non-breaking spaces from web exports, or different spellings. Check with =LEN() and =ISNUMBER(), clean with TRIM, CLEAN or VALUE, and confirm the lookup range covers all rows and uses exact match. Wrap the final formula in IFNA to label true misses.
35
What is the difference between COUNT(*) and COUNT(column)?
Show answer
COUNT(*) counts all rows; COUNT(column) counts only rows where that column is not NULL.
36
A food delivery company's orders fell 15%. How do you investigate?
Show answer
Check data accuracy, then segment by city, restaurant, time and user type; look at supply, delivery time, pricing, competitors and seasonality before proposing fixes.
37
What is the difference between sequence flow and message flow in BPMN?
Show answer
A sequence flow is a solid arrow that shows the order of activities inside one pool, so it represents work controlled by one participant. A message flow is a dashed arrow with an open circle at its start and shows communication between two different pools, such as an order email from a customer to a seller. A common modelling mistake is drawing sequence flows across pools, which wrongly implies one party controls the other's work.
38
You added new rows to the source data, but your PivotTable does not show them even after refresh. Why?
Show answer
The PivotTable source is probably a fixed range such as A1:F500, so rows added below 500 are outside it. The fix is to convert the data to an Excel Table with Ctrl+T and change the pivot's data source to the table name, so it expands automatically. Also check for blank header cells, filters on the pivot hiding new items, and whether the new rows are actually text values in a numeric column, which can change grouping.
39
What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
Show answer
The smallest version of a product with enough features to deliver value and gather real user feedback before investing more.
40
A ride-hailing app's ride cancellation rate rose from 8 to 14 percent. How would you structure the problem?
Show answer
First split by who cancels: riders or drivers. For rider cancellations, check wait times, pickup accuracy, price surges and changes in ETA. For driver cancellations, check trip distance, payment mode, low fares, destination visibility and incentive changes. Then segment by city, time of day and area. Link to recent changes like a new pricing rule. Recommend fixes for the largest driver, such as better matching or adjusted incentives.
Tips to crack the EY Business Analytics interview
- Practise explaining a data project in business terms, focusing on the problem, approach and recommendation for the client.
- Revise Excel, SQL and Power BI, which appear frequently in EY analytics and consulting job descriptions.
- Read about EY's service lines and its focus on technology, AI and sustainability consulting for fit questions.
- Keep a one-minute story ready for every project on your CV: problem, your part, tools, result.
- Practise the hard questions on this page aloud; EY interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the EY Business Analytics interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Online assessment (aptitude + technical); Technical interview; Managerial or case round; Partner or HR round. The exact rounds change with the role, team, location and your experience, so confirm the process with the recruiter.
Which topics should I prepare for the EY Business Analytics interview?
This practice set leans on Excel for Business Analysts (7), SQL for Business Analysis (6), Stakeholder Communication (6), Case Studies and Guesstimates (5). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most EY interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at EY?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in consulting interviews like EY's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does EY hire Business Analytics professionals in India?
EY has large teams in Bengaluru, Kolkata, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Kochi. Openings and locations change often, so check the EY careers page and filter by city and experience.
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