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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
You ever watch someone calculate margin while actively lying to themselves? It’s a spiritual experience.There’s this faint look of serenity—like a monk in a burning building—while they insist that yes, this customer is profitable, and no, of course the CSM isn’t secretly doing onboarding, support, and three calls a week of emotional labor because “they’re […]
The worst forecast I ever delivered was also the most “accurate.”It hit the board with a 1.2% variance to actuals. Applause. Confetti. CFO high-fived me in the hallway.And yet—I knew, standing there with my little Excel trophy—I had failed. Because what didn’t happen? We didn’t see the customer flight risk.We didn’t reroute spending early enough […]
If your finance team still chases “variance explanations” like it’s CSI: Miami, you don’t have an FP&A function. You’ve got forensic accounting in a lab coat. Variance analysis becomes a distraction when every difference gets the same attention. For the mechanics—thresholds, drivers, and how I decide what deserves investigation—use my budget variance analysis guide. This […]
Most companies don’t scale because they lack capital. They stall because they never designed an operating system strong enough to handle the weight of growth. And the finance team? They’re often the last to get one. Instead of operating like a product org with sprints and a clear roadmap, or like sales with a CRM […]
There’s a silent saboteur inside every FP&A forecasting process. Not bias.Not bad inputs.Not even the politics. It’s time. Not as in timing—that’s obvious.As in calendar drift: the misalignment between when things are supposed to happen and when they actually do. At first glance, it looks like nothing. Your sales team says Q3 will close $4M.Great—you […]
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