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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
I’ve watched SaaS finance teams chase “precision” like it’s a religion — 4 decimal places deep in ARR projections while the renewal team is still updating Salesforce manually. Then the board asks why revenue missed by 8%. Cue the CFO’s favorite lie: “It was timing.” No, it wasn’t. It was hubris. We built our forecast […]