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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
You’re juggling the board deck, a half-built forecast, 12 Excel tabs, 4 Slack threads, and an ERP that’s mid-integration. Every ping feels urgent. Every spreadsheet feels late. And by 6 p.m., you realize you’ve spent the day managing inputs, not outcomes. That’s the quiet tax of context switching. It kills clarity before it kills time. […]
I’ve watched SaaS finance teams chase “precision” like it’s a religion — 4 decimal places deep in ARR projections while the renewal team is still updating Salesforce manually. Then the board asks why revenue missed by 8%. Cue the CFO’s favorite lie: “It was timing.” No, it wasn’t. It was hubris. We built our forecast […]
Not figuratively. Literally — the workbook crashed, the links went dark, and the ARR bridge pulled a vanishing act two hours before the deck was due. I stared at the screen like a pilot watching the dashboard flicker mid-flight. Here’s the part nobody writes about: the panic isn’t just technical. It’s existential. You start questioning […]
It wasn’t the numbers that were wrong. It was the definition. Logo churn. Revenue churn. Gross churn. Net churn.Everyone in the room had a different interpretation, and somehow all of them were “right.” That’s the SaaS finance trap — you can’t manage what ten people define ten different ways. Our model looked great until we […]
Every SaaS CFO knows the feeling — twelve Excel tabs open, four Slack threads buzzing, an ERP sync failing in the background, and a board deck flashing “final_v8.” We call it “multitasking.” But really, it’s a slow bleed of attention disguised as productivity. Context switching is the silent killer of strategic thinking. It’s like trying […]
Last quarter, I watched a SaaS CFO defend a $1.5M ARR miss with a 30-tab model that looked like a Vegas light show. The formula math was flawless. The logic was delusional. Pipeline coverage was “strong.” Churn was “stable.” And bookings? “Seasonally delayed.” Translation: we built a castle on assumptions nobody questioned. I’ve seen SaaS […]