Excel Has a New Add-In: It’s Called ChatGPT
Excel Meets Its Secret Weapon Excel has always been the quiet workhorse of business. Rows, columns, SUM, VLOOKUP — a reliable toolbox. But mastering it came at a cost: you either memorized hundreds of functions or spent hours debugging formulas that broke without warning. Now there’s a twist. You don’t have to do it alone. […]
Notes from a Finance Analyst Who Forgot to Quit
Some jobs are chosen. FP&A just sort of…happens to you. One day you’re promising yourself you’ll only stay in corporate finance “a year, max.” Next thing you know, you’re explaining to an executive why SaaS churn can’t just be modeled at “5% forever” like gravity. You’re a decade older, your caffeine intake has tripled, and […]
Forecasting Is Street Food, Not Fine Dining
Corporate decks pretend forecasting is fine dining.White tablecloths, tidy charts, assumptions plated with tweezers. Spend one week in FP&A and you’ll see the truth: forecasting is street food. Greasy, improvised, passed over on a paper plate while you’re dodging traffic. Half the ingredients missing, the other half swapped out, but somehow the executives eat it […]
Confessions of a Tired FP&A Analyst
You don’t plan to end up in finance. Nobody’s five years old dreaming about pivot tables and variance bridges. You wake up one day in a gray conference room, coffee burned to tar, explaining to a CFO why headcount spend looks like it’s trying to escape orbit. And somehow that becomes your life. The Broken […]
9 Ways a Pivot Table Can Make a CFO Cry in Public
The first tear hit the table before the board chair could finish his sentence. It wasn’t loud.Just that faint, traitorous tap a CFO hopes no one hears. But in the middle of the Q4 earnings review, with a dozen sets of eyes hunting for weakness, it was the kind of sound that shifts the room’s […]
When My FP&A Model Got So Big It Qualified for Its Own Zip Code
Every finance team has its Frankenstein—the spreadsheet that starts as a modest forecast and metastasizes into a corporate public works project. Mine began as a single tab. By Q3, it was a bureaucratic anthill with 184 tabs, a pivot table the size of a congressional bill, and lookup formulas twisted like the wiring in a […]
Why I’m Trading LinkedIn Scroll Time for My Own Blog
LinkedIn Is a Casino Without the Free Drinks Ever notice that LinkedIn is basically a casino without the free drinks? I log in to “check a message” and three hours later I’m knee-deep in a 27-comment argument about whether CAC should be calculated with or without sales comp. A Blog I’ve Been Ignoring for Too […]
Why My VLOOKUP Has More Trust Issues Than My Ex
“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 […]
The Pivot Table That Knew Too Much
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 […]
SaaS Isn’t Dead. But the Lease Just Got Shorter.
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 […]
When My Forecast Triggered a Panic Hiring Spree: A Growth Model Overreaction
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 […]
Every Excel Shortcut Ranked by How Fast It Can Trigger a Midlife Crisis
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 […]
You Won’t Believe What This IF Statement Did to My Marriage
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 […]
How to VLOOKUP Your Will to Live: A Beginner’s Guide
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 […]
What a 13-year-old babysitter taught me about financial leadership
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 […]
7 Excel Functions That Will Replace Your Therapist (and Probably Your Job Too)
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. […]
Coaching Without the Crutch: What I Learned from Marla Bace
LinkedIn DMs are where nuance goes to die. You’ve got your bro-y sales pitches dressed in empathy. Cold intros from people who haven’t read your job title, let alone your work. And every now and then, a robotic flinch of curiosity—“just wanted to connect with like-minded leaders”—before they pivot to a 17-slide funnel about how […]
Cost to Serve: The Line Item You’d Rather Ghost Than Model
You ever watch someone calculate margin while actively lying to themselves? It’s a spiritual experience.There’s this faint look of serenity—like a monk in a burning building—while they insist that yes, this customer is profitable, and no, of course the CSM isn’t secretly doing onboarding, support, and three calls a week of emotional labor because “they’re […]
The Cult of Forecast Accuracy: Why Chasing Precision is Wasting Everyone’s Time
The worst forecast I ever delivered was also the most “accurate.”It hit the board with a 1.2% variance to actuals. Applause. Confetti. CFO high-fived me in the hallway.And yet—I knew, standing there with my little Excel trophy—I had failed. Because what didn’t happen? We didn’t see the customer flight risk.We didn’t reroute spending early enough […]
We Tried Running a $100M Forecast in Excel—Here’s What Broke First
Running your entire FP&A process in Excel is like flying a commercial airline with Google Maps. It’ll get you off the ground. But you’ll crash the minute conditions change. Let’s get something straight:This is not an anti-Excel piece. This is a pro-sanity one. Excel is the most powerful modeling tool in finance. No question. But […]
Stop Chasing Variances: Why Your FP&A Team is Solving the Wrong Problem
If your finance team still chases “variance explanations” like it’s CSI: Miami, you don’t have an FP&A function. You’ve got forensic accounting in a lab coat. Variance analysis becomes a distraction when every difference gets the same attention. For the mechanics—thresholds, drivers, and how I decide what deserves investigation—use my budget variance analysis guide. This […]
Why Most Annual Operating Plans Are DOA by Q2 (And What Smart CFOs Are Doing Instead)
It’s not just you—the AOP is broken. By the time your operating plan is finalized, conditions have already changed. Yet every finance team still rolls out the same rigid framework, convinced that precision equals control. But the smartest CFOs know that an AOP built for static reality won’t survive dynamic conditions. This post unpacks why […]
Designing Your Finance Operating System: The Hidden Lever Behind High-Performance Companies
Most companies don’t scale because they lack capital. They stall because they never designed an operating system strong enough to handle the weight of growth. And the finance team? They’re often the last to get one. Instead of operating like a product org with sprints and a clear roadmap, or like sales with a CRM […]
The Silent Killer of FP&A Accuracy: Calendar Drift
There’s a silent saboteur inside every FP&A forecasting process. Not bias.Not bad inputs.Not even the politics. It’s time. Not as in timing—that’s obvious.As in calendar drift: the misalignment between when things are supposed to happen and when they actually do. At first glance, it looks like nothing. Your sales team says Q3 will close $4M.Great—you […]
The CFO’s Hidden Leverage: Why Stakeholder Communication Is the Real Strategy Stack
There’s a secret weapon most CFOs underuse.It’s not a model. Not a dashboard. Not even a board slide.It’s language. This isn’t about jargon or spin.This is about narrative clarity—the kind that turns raw data into decisions.The kind that aligns departments before they drift.The kind that moves the board before the market does. This post unpacks […]
The Hidden Power Move in FP&A: Collaborative Decision-Making as a Financial Strategy
We’ve all been in that meeting. The numbers are final.The slide deck is sharp.The CFO is ready to present. And then someone from product throws in a curveball:“What if we shifted the launch to Q4 instead?” Cue the scrambling.Cue the side-eyes.Cue the last-minute model edit while everyone pretends this wasn’t foreseeable. But here’s the thing: […]
2025: How FP&A Teams Are Winning the Seat at the Strategic Table
I’ve been in finance long enough to remember when FP&A was the last to be invited to the big meetings—if we were invited at all. We were the spreadsheet people. The ones who showed up late in the process to confirm what everyone else already decided. That version of FP&A is dying. And in 2025, […]
The Strategic Art of Breaking FP&A Rules: A CFO’s Guide for SaaS Growth
There are rules in FP&A for a reason. I respect them. I really do. But after a decade in SaaS finance, I’ve learned that sometimes the difference between stagnation and breakout growth comes down to knowing which rules to bend, which to challenge, and which to quietly throw out the window. This isn’t about reckless […]
3 Reasons Data-Driven Businesses Consistently Outperform
A while back, I pushed a forecast to the executive team that looked like it had been built in a sterile lab. Smooth trends. Tight margins. No funny business. It told the story we all wanted to hear: stable burn, healthy revenue growth, clean close into year-end. It was the kind of model that says, […]
Modernizing FP&A with 21st Century Zero-Based Budgeting
The traditional budgeting process is broken. We know it, we live with it, and every December or January, we perform the same ritual — copy last year’s numbers, slap on a 3% increase, and call it strategic planning. That’s not strategy. That’s spreadsheet theater. As someone who has spent years entrenched in M&A integration, post-acquisition […]