Every CFO has lived this nightmare: You spend weeks on the annual plan.By March, it’s useless. The issue isn’t poor forecasting. It’s that traditional planning cycles weren’t designed for today’s pace. Forecasts die young because the tools are static while reality is dynamic. This article breaks down a new solution: AI-powered forecasting prompts that keep […]
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 […]
https://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/pexels-goumbik-590022-2.jpg7951200Sarah Schlotthttps://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/icon-10c-two-blob-light_clearspace-1030x1030.pngSarah Schlott2025-09-29 11:30:052025-09-29 09:18:02From Annual Planning to Rolling Forecasts: What Really Changes
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 […]
https://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/pexels-leeloothefirst-5561913-1-1.jpg8011200Sarah Schlotthttps://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/icon-10c-two-blob-light_clearspace-1030x1030.pngSarah Schlott2025-09-28 11:50:032025-09-28 19:32:32Annual Planning Is Dead on Arrival (Unless You Do This)
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. You can nail revenue projections, lock in expense budgets, and still lose credibility if your cash schedule doesn’t tie out. In practice, building cash flow forecasts in Excel means handling messy timing differences: deferred revenue, staggered collections, and […]
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. […]
https://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/pexels-lexovertoom-1109543-scaled-e1748310564879.jpg8001200Sarah Schlotthttps://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/icon-10c-two-blob-light_clearspace-1030x1030.pngSarah Schlott2025-09-22 19:08:342025-09-26 02:10:08Excel Has a New Add-In: It’s Called ChatGPT
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 […]
https://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/pexels-mareklevak-2265488-1.jpg8001200Sarah Schlotthttps://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/icon-10c-two-blob-light_clearspace-1030x1030.pngSarah Schlott2025-08-28 19:11:482025-09-27 18:01:13Notes from a Finance Analyst Who Forgot to Quit
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 […]
https://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/pexels-egonshotsphotos-2240361-1.jpg8001200Sarah Schlotthttps://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/icon-10c-two-blob-light_clearspace-1030x1030.pngSarah Schlott2025-08-28 05:59:212025-09-27 18:01:34Forecasting Is Street Food, Not Fine Dining
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 […]
https://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/pexels-tima-miroshnichenko-6694492-scaled-e1747874873980.jpg8001200Sarah Schlotthttps://sarahgschlott.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/icon-10c-two-blob-light_clearspace-1030x1030.pngSarah Schlott2025-08-27 15:44:472025-09-27 18:02:32Confessions of a Tired FP&A Analyst
How to Keep Your Forecasts Alive Beyond Q1
Every CFO has lived this nightmare: You spend weeks on the annual plan.By March, it’s useless. The issue isn’t poor forecasting. It’s that traditional planning cycles weren’t designed for today’s pace. Forecasts die young because the tools are static while reality is dynamic. This article breaks down a new solution: AI-powered forecasting prompts that keep […]
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 […]
Account Reconciliation in Excel With ChatGPT Prompts
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 […]
Cash Flow Forecasting in Excel With ChatGPT Prompts
Why Cash Flow Forecasting Breaks FP&A Models Cash flow forecasting is one of the hardest FP&A tasks. You can nail revenue projections, lock in expense budgets, and still lose credibility if your cash schedule doesn’t tie out. In practice, building cash flow forecasts in Excel means handling messy timing differences: deferred revenue, staggered collections, and […]
Excel Has a New Add-In: It’s Called ChatGPT
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. […]
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 […]