Market Regulator Furloughs: Lessons for FP&A Oversight

Hey there… You’ve just run into members-only territory. But don’t worry — joining is totally free. No credit card. No gotchas. Just instant access. When you join the FP&A Insider Community, you’ll get: Free resources you won’t find anywhere else Updates on new FP&A strategies and tools A front-row seat to conversations with operators who […]

From Annual Planning to Rolling Forecasts: What Really Changes

The first time I killed the old annual planning cycle, I thought I was solving my biggest headache. No more department wish lists stacked like Jenga blocks.No more 80-page plans that went stale by March.No more pretending the future was predictable. I rebuilt the system into something alive: driver-based, rolling, and operator-ready. And for about […]

Annual Planning Is Dead on Arrival (Unless You Do This)

Every September I used to feel the same pit in my stomach. Annual planning season. The marathon of spreadsheets, headcount fights, and weekend modeling sessions where we all pretended we could map out the next twelve months like a perfect chess match. And yet, no matter how carefully I built the plan — how many […]

Automating Intercompany Eliminations with ChatGPT

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 […]

Notes from a Finance Analyst Who Forgot to Quit

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 […]

Forecasting Is Street Food, Not Fine Dining

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 […]

Confessions of a Tired FP&A Analyst

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 […]

When My FP&A Model Got So Big It Qualified for Its Own Zip Code

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 […]

When My Forecast Triggered a Panic Hiring Spree: A Growth Model Overreaction

It started with an innocent tab in Excel. One that was supposed to be a simple quarterly forecast.One that, in my mind, would reassure leadership we were “on track.”One that—through no fault of my own—became the match that set the HR department on fire. By the end of the week, the company had committed to […]