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 […]
I like dynamic arrays. I use them. I also think Excel has become very good at making fragile logic look respectable. =UNIQUE() is a perfect example. It is clean. Fast. No helper columns. No visible mess. And if the source data is dirty, it can give you a beautifully organized version of the wrong answer. […]
I have nothing against =IF(). I have something against discovering that a financial model contains 1,742 of them and that three people have different theories about what they mean. That is not an Excel problem. That is a design problem wearing parentheses. IF() is one of the most useful formulas in Excel. It is also […]
The most useful AI conversation in FP&A has changed. A year ago, a lot of the discussion was still about whether AI could write a formula, summarize a variance or save someone fifteen minutes in Excel. Those uses are fine. They are also the least interesting part now. The question I care about is what […]
In 2025, I was nominated for a Datarails Office of the CFO Award. I made a joke at the time that it was the closest thing Finance had to the Oscars. I still think that is funny, mostly because our red carpet would be a hallway outside a conference room and somebody would be asking […]
An ARR report that does not tie is not a reporting inconvenience. It is a trust problem. And in SaaS, it usually exposes something deeper than one broken formula. CRM says one thing. Billing says another. The general ledger recognizes revenue on its own schedule. A spreadsheet sits between them trying to make everyone behave. […]
A churn model can be mathematically correct and still lie to management. Not because the formulas are wrong. Because “churn” is often asked to summarize several different customer behaviors in one comforting average. That works until the mix changes. Enterprise renewals slip. SMB customers cancel for price. A large account contracts but does not leave. […]
There are days in Finance when the calendar looks less like a schedule and more like evidence. Board prep. Forecast review. A system issue. Three business-partner questions. A meeting about the meeting that will decide when the next meeting happens. Then 5:30 arrives and the one piece of work that actually required judgment is still […]
An ERP does not suddenly stop scaling one morning. It usually gives warnings. More manual exports. More reconciliation. More fields nobody trusts. More conversations that begin with, “Which system are you looking at?” Then someone concludes the company has outgrown the ERP. Maybe. Sometimes the system is the problem. Sometimes the operating model grew faster […]
A forecast does not become trustworthy because the model calculates to four decimal places. I wish it did. Excel would have solved management uncertainty sometime around 1998. The difficult part of forecasting is not arithmetic. It is deciding which assumptions deserve to be believed, for how long, and what evidence should make us change them. […]