Long-Range Financial Planning: Build a Three-Year Plan Without Pretending to Predict
A practical three-year financial planning framework for CFOs: build driver-based scenarios, test cash needs, and avoid false precision.
Tag Archive for: Financial Modeling
Lease or Buy the Equipment? I’d Like to See the Numbers Before We Sign Anything.
Should your business lease or buy equipment? Compare total costs, present value, financing, cash flow, and risk with a practical worked example.
What Is FP&A? A Practical Guide to Financial Planning & Analysis
FP&A has a branding problem. Tell someone you work in Accounting and they have a general idea what you do. Tell them you’re in Sales and they definitely have an idea what you do. Tell someone you work in Financial Planning & Analysis and there is usually a small pause. Then: “So…finance?” Yes. Technically. That […]
FP&A Software: When Does Your Finance Team Actually Need It?
I like software. I also like buying things. Amazon has documented this extensively. So you might assume I’d be very supportive when someone tells me their Finance team needs a new FP&A platform. Not necessarily. In fact, one of the first questions I’d ask is probably the least exciting one: What problem are you trying […]
Driver-Based Forecasting: How to Find the Right Business Drivers
I get suspicious when someone tells me they have 47 drivers in their forecast. At that point, I don’t think you have drivers. I think you have a very complicated spreadsheet. There is a difference. Driver-based forecasting is one of those FP&A ideas that sounds almost impossible to disagree with. Instead of taking last year’s […]
Financial Forecasting Methods: How to Choose the Right One
I have never understood why companies spend enormous amounts of time building sophisticated forecasts and then use essentially the same forecasting method for everything in them. Revenue? Historical growth plus an adjustment. Travel? Historical growth plus an adjustment. Software? Historical growth plus an adjustment. Headcount? Last year plus the people we think we’re hiring. Coffee? […]
Financial Scenario Planning: How FP&A Can Build Scenarios That Actually Help Management
I have trust issues with scenario models. Not because I don’t like scenarios. I do. I’ve built plenty of them. I’ve also sat in meetings where we had so many scenarios that I started to suspect we were using Excel to avoid making a decision. You know the meeting I’m talking about. Base case. Upside […]
Building FP&A From Absolute Zero: Katelyn Stienen on Budgets, Business Partnership, and the Stories Behind the Numbers
What would you do if you walked into a five-year-old company with more than 170 legal entities, roughly 10,000 budget lines, no FP&A planning system, department heads who had never worked with a structured P&L, and tax rules capable of changing while you were still building the budget? I think I’d need coffee first. Probably […]
What Does an FP&A Consultant Do? A Practical Guide
“FP&A consultant” is one of those job descriptions that can mean almost anything. Build a forecast. Fix a model. Help with the budget. Prepare something for the board. Figure out why margins are falling. Untangle a reporting process that apparently requires three people, six spreadsheets and one person who absolutely cannot take vacation. All technically […]
How to Review a Financial Model Before You Trust It
I don’t start reviewing a financial model with the formulas. This occasionally bothers people. They’ve spent a lot of time building those formulas. There may be nested IF statements. INDEX MATCH. XLOOKUP. Maybe something involving OFFSET that nobody wants to discuss. I’m sure it’s all very impressive. I want to know why revenue grows 12%. […]
Sarah Schlott
FP&A consulting, forecasting, accounting support and finance strategy for CFOs and growing finance teams.