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 […]
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 […]