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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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