There is a particular kind of monthly Finance meeting where every variance gets treated like it has committed a crime. Travel is $8,000 over budget. Explain it. Software is $11,000 under. Explain it. Office supplies are $3,700 over. Apparently we need closure. Meanwhile, revenue is $2.4 million below plan and somehow we’ve allocated roughly the […]
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 […]
I have never understood why December 31 gets so much authority over financial planning. Apparently the calendar changes and Finance is supposed to lose interest in what happens next. It’s October. We have a three-month forecast remaining. Very useful. Management is making hiring decisions that will affect next summer, Sales is talking about deals that […]
I can usually tell when a company has confused its budget with its forecast. It’s September. The business has changed. Sales are running below plan. Hiring moved. A product launch slipped. A large customer expanded unexpectedly. Marketing changed its spending. And somehow the forecast still looks remarkably similar to the budget everyone approved nine months […]
I have a fairly simple test for a forecasting process. When the forecast changes, can anyone explain why? Not which cell changed. Not which department submitted a new number. Not that revenue is now $600,000 lower than it was three weeks ago. What changed in the business? That question sounds embarrassingly basic until you’ve sat […]
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 […]
There’s this idea floating around that forecasting is a young company’s game. Fast, agile startups pivoting on a dime. Old companies? Too slow. Too political. Too stuck in their ways. I used to believe that too. Until a friend of mine who works at a 120-year-old manufacturing company told me how they completely transformed their […]
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