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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]