Your 40s are where financial decisions stop being theoretical. You’re earning, juggling responsibilities, and thinking ahead—all at once. But this is also the decade where small missteps compound faster, and “I’ll fix it later” gets expensive. I’ve made some of these mistakes myself. Others I’ve seen play out repeatedly. None of them look dramatic in […]
https://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/88u-TQ8Sx5MiT8TjXZQh07NOqO1zzg3DT3oJYJnH6fceHyTIIBRGPSDUtlN0dK45nCm-qt_bNo8z4tDgEMUNZ4gVvW2TpWfPNQCp-d8_PPnGrULTpUb05R6xacyXHbAt8-_wEfcN-nU1jJ5ea9DkPDgQ_jqX23v9aQmBInhEpu1DsG9EgzGphk7Yel0Tn0SR.jpeg13652048Sarah Schlotthttps://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ChatGPT-Image-May-13-2025-06_43_17-PM.pngSarah Schlott2026-04-26 21:57:342026-04-26 21:57:348 Financial Mistakes Women in Their 40s Make—and How to Fix Them (2026 Guide)
And Somewhere, an FP&A Model Just Started Lying The number dropped.Below 200,000. Cue the headline writers polishing the word resilient like it’s a participation trophy. But if you work in FP&A, that number doesn’t mean “things are fine.”It means nothing is giving way. And nothing costs more than pressure that refuses to release. The number […]
It looks clean.Effortless.No helper columns.No visible mess. That’s the problem. We’ve all been told that modern Excel formulas are smarter — that dynamic arrays make reporting faster, cleaner, more “automated.”But some automation hides danger better than any manual error ever could. And nothing proves that more than =UNIQUE(). Why =UNIQUE() Can Quietly Wreck Your Model […]
Every finance analyst has a love story that ends badly.Mine started with =IF(). It seemed harmless at first.A quick fix here, a logic tweak there — a little “if this, then that” to make a stubborn report behave. But one day, I opened a model with 1,742 nested IFs.No macros. No VBA. Just raw logic […]
https://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/pexels-goumbik-590022-1-modified-1.jpg7951200Sarah Schlotthttps://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ChatGPT-Image-May-13-2025-06_43_17-PM.pngSarah Schlott2025-10-23 19:40:482025-10-23 19:40:48The Most Dangerous Excel Formula in Finance
A few years ago, “AI in FP&A” meant faster reconciliations and prettier dashboards.Now it means something radically different. It means systems that think, not just calculate.That interpret, not just automate. Across finance, a quiet revolution is unfolding.Teams aren’t using AI to replace themselves — they’re using it to reason with reality faster than ever before. […]
I just found out I’ve been nominated for the 2025 Office of the CFO Awards by Datarails — the closest thing finance has to the Oscars. And honestly, I’m still not sure if I should thank my forecasting model or apologize to it. Because if you’ve ever spent 11 p.m. whispering “please balance” to a […]
https://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/pexels-goumbik-590022-1-modified-1.jpg7951200Sarah Schlotthttps://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ChatGPT-Image-May-13-2025-06_43_17-PM.pngSarah Schlott2025-10-18 08:25:062025-10-18 08:25:06I Didn’t Choose the Spreadsheet Life — The Spreadsheet Life Chose Me
Not by much — just $180K.Enough to ruin dinner. We’d spent the week chasing late renewals and cleaning up deferred revenue schedules, but when I opened the dashboard at 10:42 p.m., it hit me: the model was right, the data wasn’t. Classic SaaS problem. Salesforce said one thing, NetSuite said another, and the spreadsheet was […]
https://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/pexels-tima-miroshnichenko-6694878-modified-1.jpg8001200Sarah Schlotthttps://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ChatGPT-Image-May-13-2025-06_43_17-PM.pngSarah Schlott2025-10-17 07:30:072025-10-05 16:25:41The night before our board meeting, the ARR report didn’t tie out.
Not on purpose.Just death by optimism. We’d been running with a simple rule: assume “steady-state churn” based on last quarter’s average. It worked fine — until enterprise renewals started slipping into the next quarter, and the illusion broke. ARR looked flat.But cash told the truth. That’s when we learned the hard way: averages in SaaS […]
https://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/pexels-tima-miroshnichenko-6694492-modified-1.jpg8001200Sarah Schlotthttps://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ChatGPT-Image-May-13-2025-06_43_17-PM.pngSarah Schlott2025-10-16 07:30:572025-10-05 16:26:02We rebuilt our churn model after it lied to us — in front of the board.
You’re juggling the board deck, a half-built forecast, 12 Excel tabs, 4 Slack threads, and an ERP that’s mid-integration. Every ping feels urgent. Every spreadsheet feels late. And by 6 p.m., you realize you’ve spent the day managing inputs, not outcomes. That’s the quiet tax of context switching. It kills clarity before it kills time. […]
https://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/pexels-rdne-7948063-2-modified-2.jpg8001200Sarah Schlotthttps://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ChatGPT-Image-May-13-2025-06_43_17-PM.pngSarah Schlott2025-10-15 07:30:542025-10-05 16:26:18Some days being a SaaS CFO feels like air traffic control — but every plane is on fire.
Every SaaS CFO learns this the hard way. You start with a clean build. A few modules. Smooth integrations. Then scale hits — 3x headcount, 4x customers, 9x data. Suddenly, your ERP isn’t helping operations. It’s holding them hostage. You’ve got NetSuite scripts looping into oblivion. Salesforce fields that stopped syncing three weeks ago. And […]
8 Financial Mistakes Women in Their 40s Make—and How to Fix Them (2026 Guide)
Your 40s are where financial decisions stop being theoretical. You’re earning, juggling responsibilities, and thinking ahead—all at once. But this is also the decade where small missteps compound faster, and “I’ll fix it later” gets expensive. I’ve made some of these mistakes myself. Others I’ve seen play out repeatedly. None of them look dramatic in […]
Jobless Claims Fell Below 200,000
And Somewhere, an FP&A Model Just Started Lying The number dropped.Below 200,000. Cue the headline writers polishing the word resilient like it’s a participation trophy. But if you work in FP&A, that number doesn’t mean “things are fine.”It means nothing is giving way. And nothing costs more than pressure that refuses to release. The number […]
The Most Dangerous “Modern” Excel Formula: =UNIQUE()
It looks clean.Effortless.No helper columns.No visible mess. That’s the problem. We’ve all been told that modern Excel formulas are smarter — that dynamic arrays make reporting faster, cleaner, more “automated.”But some automation hides danger better than any manual error ever could. And nothing proves that more than =UNIQUE(). Why =UNIQUE() Can Quietly Wreck Your Model […]
The Most Dangerous Excel Formula in Finance
Every finance analyst has a love story that ends badly.Mine started with =IF(). It seemed harmless at first.A quick fix here, a logic tweak there — a little “if this, then that” to make a stubborn report behave. But one day, I opened a model with 1,742 nested IFs.No macros. No VBA. Just raw logic […]
The Quiet Revolution: AI in FP&A 2025
A few years ago, “AI in FP&A” meant faster reconciliations and prettier dashboards.Now it means something radically different. It means systems that think, not just calculate.That interpret, not just automate. Across finance, a quiet revolution is unfolding.Teams aren’t using AI to replace themselves — they’re using it to reason with reality faster than ever before. […]
I Didn’t Choose the Spreadsheet Life — The Spreadsheet Life Chose Me
I just found out I’ve been nominated for the 2025 Office of the CFO Awards by Datarails — the closest thing finance has to the Oscars. And honestly, I’m still not sure if I should thank my forecasting model or apologize to it. Because if you’ve ever spent 11 p.m. whispering “please balance” to a […]
The night before our board meeting, the ARR report didn’t tie out.
Not by much — just $180K.Enough to ruin dinner. We’d spent the week chasing late renewals and cleaning up deferred revenue schedules, but when I opened the dashboard at 10:42 p.m., it hit me: the model was right, the data wasn’t. Classic SaaS problem. Salesforce said one thing, NetSuite said another, and the spreadsheet was […]
We rebuilt our churn model after it lied to us — in front of the board.
Not on purpose.Just death by optimism. We’d been running with a simple rule: assume “steady-state churn” based on last quarter’s average. It worked fine — until enterprise renewals started slipping into the next quarter, and the illusion broke. ARR looked flat.But cash told the truth. That’s when we learned the hard way: averages in SaaS […]
Some days being a SaaS CFO feels like air traffic control — but every plane is on fire.
You’re juggling the board deck, a half-built forecast, 12 Excel tabs, 4 Slack threads, and an ERP that’s mid-integration. Every ping feels urgent. Every spreadsheet feels late. And by 6 p.m., you realize you’ve spent the day managing inputs, not outcomes. That’s the quiet tax of context switching. It kills clarity before it kills time. […]
Your ERP isn’t scaling — it’s staging a coup.
Every SaaS CFO learns this the hard way. You start with a clean build. A few modules. Smooth integrations. Then scale hits — 3x headcount, 4x customers, 9x data. Suddenly, your ERP isn’t helping operations. It’s holding them hostage. You’ve got NetSuite scripts looping into oblivion. Salesforce fields that stopped syncing three weeks ago. And […]