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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A while back, I pushed a forecast to the executive team that looked like it had been built in a sterile lab. Smooth trends. Tight margins. No funny business. It told the story we all wanted to hear: stable burn, healthy revenue growth, clean close into year-end. It was the kind of model that says, […]
Here’s the truth most FP&A leaders won’t say out loud: the majority of financial models aren’t built for decision-making. They’re built for optics. They exist to be opened in board meetings, skimmed over by execs, and bookmarked as evidence that Finance is doing its job. But when Sales wants to run a hiring scenario or […]
I remember the moment I realized our FP&A team had become a reporting machine. It was a Tuesday. 7:43 p.m. I was still in the office. Someone from ops had just Slacked me asking for a version of the Q2 forecast that accounted for a 5% shift in headcount timing. I was on version 17 […]