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“If your forecast only works when you believe in it, it’s not a forecast—it’s a faith-based initiative.” It started with a spreadsheet.Doesn’t it always? One column of “Actuals,” one column of “Plan,” and a third column that looked like it was about to ghost me. That’s where VLOOKUP lived—dragged across 400 rows, promising to unite […]
It started as a harmless spreadsheet.A nice, clean workbook. Six tabs. No merged cells. A color palette you could take home to your mother. Then one day, it got… curious. You know how it is in SaaS finance. You build one pivot table to tidy up last quarter’s churn analysis, and suddenly it’s doing cross-tabulations […]
A Response to Forbes’ “SaaS Ave” Piece by Daniel Newman It was Saturday morning.The dishwasher was still humming from last night’s half-hearted “we’ll clean up later” pact. My coffee was going lukewarm. My inbox had exactly two emails: a reminder from the dentist and a link from my husband with the subject line: “Thought of […]
It started with an innocent tab in Excel. One that was supposed to be a simple quarterly forecast.One that, in my mind, would reassure leadership we were “on track.”One that—through no fault of my own—became the match that set the HR department on fire. By the end of the week, the company had committed to […]
Let’s be honest — no one wakes up thinking, “Today’s the day I completely lose my grip on reality because of a spreadsheet.” And yet, here we are.Because Excel doesn’t just store numbers.It stores your soul. In FP&A, shortcuts are supposed to make you faster.Instead, they just accelerate the moment you realize your life’s work […]
IF(logic_test, value_if_true, value_if_false) Was it the logic test?Was it the value_if_false?Or was it me? Hard to say now, sitting on the couch next to a husband who won’t make eye contact, because apparently, I “weaponized Excel again.” But I know this: somewhere between “just a quick model update” and “you built what??” I lost the […]
Let’s not pretend anyone enjoys Excel. You don’t crack open a spreadsheet because life is bursting with meaning. You open Excel the way a mid-century housewife opened gin at 2pm: quietly, with dread, and because someone just asked about KPIs again. So today, we’re doing something useful with it. We’re going to use Excel to […]
You don’t forget the first time you’re left in charge of someone else’s chaos. For me, it was a suburban living room full of Goldfish crumbs and sticky Legos. I was 13. My older sister—a seasoned babysitter with a Rolodex of wealthy neighborhood clients—was passing the torch. I asked the question every first-timer asks.“What do […]
By Someone Who’s Been Held Hostage by a Circular Reference Since 2020 At some point in the past ten years—no one’s exactly sure when—therapy got outsourced to Google Sheets and SaaS dashboards. The budget got cut, the benefits evaporated, and suddenly your emotional stability was being maintained by a locked cell and a conditional format. […]