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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It looks clean.Effortless.No helper columns.No visible mess. That’s the problem. We’ve all been told that modern Excel formulas are smarter — that dynamic arrays make reporting faster, cleaner, more “automated.”But some automation hides danger better than any manual error ever could. And nothing proves that more than =UNIQUE(). Why =UNIQUE() Can Quietly Wreck Your Model […]
Every finance analyst has a love story that ends badly.Mine started with =IF(). It seemed harmless at first.A quick fix here, a logic tweak there — a little “if this, then that” to make a stubborn report behave. But one day, I opened a model with 1,742 nested IFs.No macros. No VBA. Just raw logic […]
A few years ago, “AI in FP&A” meant faster reconciliations and prettier dashboards.Now it means something radically different. It means systems that think, not just calculate.That interpret, not just automate. Across finance, a quiet revolution is unfolding.Teams aren’t using AI to replace themselves — they’re using it to reason with reality faster than ever before. […]
I just found out I’ve been nominated for the 2025 Office of the CFO Awards by Datarails — the closest thing finance has to the Oscars. And honestly, I’m still not sure if I should thank my forecasting model or apologize to it. Because if you’ve ever spent 11 p.m. whispering “please balance” to a […]
Not by much — just $180K.Enough to ruin dinner. We’d spent the week chasing late renewals and cleaning up deferred revenue schedules, but when I opened the dashboard at 10:42 p.m., it hit me: the model was right, the data wasn’t. Classic SaaS problem. Salesforce said one thing, NetSuite said another, and the spreadsheet was […]
Not on purpose.Just death by optimism. We’d been running with a simple rule: assume “steady-state churn” based on last quarter’s average. It worked fine — until enterprise renewals started slipping into the next quarter, and the illusion broke. ARR looked flat.But cash told the truth. That’s when we learned the hard way: averages in SaaS […]