It started, as most modern corporate absurdities do, with a single sentence in a leadership Slack thread: “Do we really need Excel for this?” Cue the floodgates. Someone (from Marketing, naturally) posted a Medium think piece on how “spreadsheets are a relic of the past.” Someone else chimed in about their nephew using Notion for […]
Here’s a dirty little secret of finance: the more polished the deck, the more likely there’s duct tape holding the data pipeline together. I’ve seen it. Flashy dashboards. Perfectly aligned KPIs. Everyone nodding in the boardroom—until someone asks, “How was that calculated?” Cue the mad scramble: Slack threads, undocumented Excel formulas, a stale mapping file […]
Let me give it to you straight: most finance teams are flying their planes while building the wings. And that’s fine—until you hit turbulence. I’ve worked with scaling companies where the first $10M in revenue was built on ad hoc Excel reports, stitched together the night before the board meeting. And hey—it worked. Until it […]
Let’s start with a truth no one likes to say out loud: audits don’t fail because the numbers were wrong. They fail because no one can prove they were right. I’ve seen it too many times. You’ve got a perfectly accurate board deck. A forecast that matches actuals to the penny. But when the auditors […]
Here’s a hard truth they don’t tell you in finance onboarding: most “financial reporting” is glorified janitorial work. You know the drill. Dump the GL. Copy and paste into five different workbooks. Filter out the junk rows. Reformat dates. Fix that one column that always comes in as text instead of numbers. Then pray your […]
Let me tell you something about forecasting that doesn’t make it into the glossy investor decks: it’s less art, more street fight. Forecasting is what happens when you’re locked in a room with imperfect data, an impatient executive team, and the ticking clock of a quarterly board meeting. I’ve lived that loop more times than […]
I’ve seen more dashboards die in the wild than PowerPoint decks in an abandoned investor folder. You know the type—some over-engineered, visually stunning, SaaS-powered monstrosity that looks great until someone asks for a new metric and you realize no one on the team knows how it was built. Or worse: the original architect left the […]
Let’s skip the pleasantries. If you’re in strategic finance and still fumbling around with basic formulas, you’re wasting time, missing insights, and burning credibility. I’ve seen it firsthand: high-performing FP&A teams with broken models, inconsistent logic, and bloated files that barely run. The fix? It’s not another dashboarding tool or AI-powered platform. It’s mastering the […]
Let me say this up front: Month-end reporting doesn’t have to feel like an endurance sport. We all know the drill. You build your reporting pack. You double-check numbers. You chase down last-minute actuals from operations. You rebuild links that broke since last month. You massage charts to be board-ready. And somewhere along the way, […]