Things I Notice When a Finance Function Isn’t Working
I can usually tell pretty quickly when a finance function isn’t working. Not because the forecast is wrong. Forecasts are wrong all the time. If being wrong disqualified a finance team, we’d have to shut down the profession. It’s usually smaller things. Someone says, “Let me check with Mike.” Then someone else says it. Then […]
I Have Trust Issues With Beautiful Financial Models
I have trust issues with beautiful financial models. Not because I don’t like them. I do. Give me clean tabs, consistent formatting, sensible colors and a model where I don’t need an archaeological expedition to find the assumptions. I’m happy. But I’ve been around Finance long enough to know that a beautiful spreadsheet and a […]
Good News Makes Me Nervous
I have a slightly inconvenient habit in Finance. When the numbers are bad, I ask questions. When the numbers are good, I ask more questions. Revenue is $800,000 ahead of forecast? Great. Why? Gross margin improved three points? Wonderful. What happened? Cash collections suddenly accelerated? Now I’m suspicious. This is probably not the personality trait […]
Finance Is Supposed to Know the Business. Somehow We Made That Optional
I started my career as a billing temp. Not exactly the traditional origin story for a finance executive. No investment banking. No glamorous rotational program. No dramatic montage involving Wall Street, three computer monitors and someone yelling about EBITDA. I was billing people. But one of the first things I remember doing was asking if […]
The Budget Was Approved Long Before the Meeting
One of the more curious things I’ve noticed over the years is that budgets are often approved long before anyone walks into the conference room. That sounds ridiculous, of course. The meeting is on everyone’s calendar. The deck is polished. The assumptions have been circulated. People ask questions. Slides get skipped. Someone inevitably says, “Let’s […]
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()
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. […]
The Most Dangerous Excel Formula in Finance
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 Quiet Revolution: AI in FP&A 2025
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 […]
I Didn’t Choose the Spreadsheet Life — The Spreadsheet Life Chose Me
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 […]
The night before our board meeting, the ARR report didn’t tie out.
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. […]
We rebuilt our churn model after it lied to us — in front of the board.
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. […]
Some days being a SaaS CFO feels like air traffic control — but every plane is on fire.
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 […]
Your ERP isn’t scaling — it’s staging a coup.
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 […]
Your forecast isn’t broken. Your assumptions are drunk.
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. […]
The night before the board meeting, my forecast broke.
A financial model should be able to survive a bad afternoon. I do not mean a meteor strike. I mean an ordinary finance bad afternoon: a source file changes, a link breaks, someone inserts a column, the forecast needs an update two hours before a meeting, and the person who built the workbook is not […]
We rebuilt our churn reporting last quarter—because it burned us in a board meeting.
Churn reporting can be wrong even when every number is technically correct. That usually happens when people use the same word for different calculations. Logo churn. Gross revenue churn. Net revenue retention. Contraction. Cancellation. Non-renewal. Put six people in a room and ask, “What was churn?” You may get six defensible answers. That is not […]
Your calendar isn’t full because you’re important. It’s full because you’re reactive.
Every SaaS CFO knows the feeling — twelve Excel tabs open, four Slack threads buzzing, an ERP sync failing in the background, and a board deck flashing “final_v8.” We call it “multitasking.” But really, it’s a slow bleed of attention disguised as productivity. Context switching is the silent killer of strategic thinking. It’s like trying […]
Your ERP isn’t scaling. It’s gaslighting you.
Every SaaS CFO hits this point — the system that was supposed to automate reporting now argues with itself every close. ARR doesn’t match CRM. Billings lag revenue. And the “integration” feels like a long-distance relationship. The board call where ARR missed by 10%? That wasn’t a forecast issue. It was your ERP whispering sweet […]
Your forecast isn’t wrong. It’s just lying to you politely.
Last quarter, I watched a SaaS CFO defend a $1.5M ARR miss with a 30-tab model that looked like a Vegas light show. The formula math was flawless. The logic was delusional. Pipeline coverage was “strong.” Churn was “stable.” And bookings? “Seasonally delayed.” Translation: we built a castle on assumptions nobody questioned. I’ve seen SaaS […]
The Hidden Cost of “Free” AI: What You’re Really Trading Away
Just read a LinkedIn post from: Kai Blakeborough That started with … “If you’re using an AI tool for free, you’re not the customer.You’re the product.” – Kai Blakeborough That’s not cynicism — it’s the modern business model. This week proved it beyond doubt: Meta announced plans to serve ads based on what users say […]
Market Regulator Furloughs: Lessons for FP&A Oversight
Why a Government Furlough Should Worry CFOs The headline reads:“U.S. market regulators begin furloughs as federal funding lapses, curtailing oversight and delaying IPOs.” On the surface, it’s Washington politics.But the ripple effect is economic. When regulators go silent: IPOs freeze. Investor confidence falters. Transparency evaporates. It’s not that companies stop operating. It’s that the referee […]
AI for Account Reconciliations: Automating Month-End Close with ChatGPT
Why AI for Account Reconciliations Speeds Up Month-End Close Every controller knows the pain: reconciliations eat hours. Skip them, and the fallout is immediate — trust erodes with executives, auditors, and even your own team. AI isn’t replacing reconciliations. It’s making them faster, cleaner, and more audit-proof. What ChatGPT Adds to Account Reconciliation Workflows Unlike […]
How to Keep Your Forecasts Alive Beyond Q1
Every CFO has lived this nightmare: You spend weeks on the annual plan.By March, it’s useless. The issue isn’t poor forecasting. It’s that traditional planning cycles weren’t designed for today’s pace. Forecasts die young because the tools are static while reality is dynamic. This article breaks down a new solution: AI-powered forecasting prompts that keep […]
From Annual Planning to Rolling Forecasts: What Really Changes
The first time I killed the old annual planning cycle, I thought I was solving my biggest headache. No more department wish lists stacked like Jenga blocks.No more 80-page plans that went stale by March.No more pretending the future was predictable. I rebuilt the system into something alive: driver-based, rolling, and operator-ready. And for about […]
Annual Planning Is Dead on Arrival (Unless You Do This)
Every September I used to feel the same pit in my stomach. Annual planning season. If you’re separating the annual plan from the business’s current outlook, start with the difference between a budget and a forecast. The marathon of spreadsheets, headcount fights, and weekend modeling sessions where we all pretended we could map out the […]
Automating Intercompany Eliminations with ChatGPT
I used to joke that intercompany eliminations were the Bermuda Triangle of consolidation.Everything went in — invoices, transfers, equity movements — and nothing came out clean. Month-end would arrive, and I’d sit there at 10:30 p.m. staring at mismatched balances, praying that NetSuite’s eliminations report wasn’t lying to me. If you’ve ever tried to reconcile […]
Account Reconciliation in Excel With ChatGPT Prompts
Why I tested ChatGPT on account reconciliations Reconciliations are the part of accounting that quietly eats time. Matching bank feeds against the general ledger, hunting down timing differences, and tracing stale checks — it’s thankless but essential. For years, I did this manually in Excel. I’d lean on VLOOKUP, COUNTIF, and conditional formatting, and it […]
Cash Flow Forecasting in Excel With ChatGPT Prompts
Why Cash Flow Forecasting Breaks FP&A Models Cash flow forecasting is one of the hardest FP&A tasks. If near-term liquidity is the problem, I would start with the 13-week structure before worrying about automation. You can nail revenue projections, lock in expense budgets, and still lose credibility if your cash schedule doesn’t tie out. In […]