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. […]
Let’s not pretend anyone enjoys Excel. You don’t crack open a spreadsheet because life is bursting with meaning. You open Excel the way a mid-century housewife opened gin at 2pm: quietly, with dread, and because someone just asked about KPIs again. So today, we’re doing something useful with it. We’re going to use Excel to […]
You don’t forget the first time you’re left in charge of someone else’s chaos. For me, it was a suburban living room full of Goldfish crumbs and sticky Legos. I was 13. My older sister—a seasoned babysitter with a Rolodex of wealthy neighborhood clients—was passing the torch. I asked the question every first-timer asks.“What do […]
By Someone Who’s Been Held Hostage by a Circular Reference Since 2020 At some point in the past ten years—no one’s exactly sure when—therapy got outsourced to Google Sheets and SaaS dashboards. The budget got cut, the benefits evaporated, and suddenly your emotional stability was being maintained by a locked cell and a conditional format. […]
Running your entire FP&A process in Excel is like flying a commercial airline with Google Maps. It’ll get you off the ground. But you’ll crash the minute conditions change. Let’s get something straight:This is not an anti-Excel piece. This is a pro-sanity one. Excel is the most powerful modeling tool in finance. No question. But […]
It’s not just you—the AOP is broken. By the time your operating plan is finalized, conditions have already changed. Yet every finance team still rolls out the same rigid framework, convinced that precision equals control. But the smartest CFOs know that an AOP built for static reality won’t survive dynamic conditions. This post unpacks why […]
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 […]
It started, as most modern corporate absurdities do, with a single sentence in a leadership Slack thread: “Do we really need Excel for this?” Cue the floodgates. Someone (from Marketing, naturally) posted a Medium think piece on how “spreadsheets are a relic of the past.” Someone else chimed in about their nephew using Notion for […]