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 […]
I’ve been in finance long enough to remember when FP&A was the last to be invited to the big meetings—if we were invited at all. We were the spreadsheet people. The ones who showed up late in the process to confirm what everyone else already decided. That version of FP&A is dying. And in 2025, […]
There are rules in FP&A for a reason. I respect them. I really do. But after a decade in SaaS finance, I’ve learned that sometimes the difference between stagnation and breakout growth comes down to knowing which rules to bend, which to challenge, and which to quietly throw out the window. This isn’t about reckless […]
It happened last Thursday. Around 3:47 PM. Somewhere between the third slide on “AI-powered FP&A automation” and the host’s pitch for a trial subscription, a CFO stood up from their Herman Miller chair, stared blankly out the window like a prophet seeing the void, and declared: “We’re done here. Strategic finance: mission accomplished.” No one […]
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 […]
Let me tell you something about forecasting that doesn’t make it into the glossy investor decks: it’s less art, more street fight. Forecasting is what happens when you’re locked in a room with imperfect data, an impatient executive team, and the ticking clock of a quarterly board meeting. I’ve lived that loop more times than […]
Let me say this up front: Month-end reporting doesn’t have to feel like an endurance sport. We all know the drill. You build your reporting pack. You double-check numbers. You chase down last-minute actuals from operations. You rebuild links that broke since last month. You massage charts to be board-ready. And somewhere along the way, […]
Let me be honest: budgets are broken. At least, the traditional kind. You know the one: twelve-months-in-advance, set-it-and-forget-it, rooted in last year’s numbers, built to please the board rather than steer the business. I’ve built those. I’ve torn them apart, too. Rolling forecasts, when done right, aren’t just a better planning tool—they’re a better way […]
I used to think we could scale our finance team with grit, hustle, and spreadsheets. And for a while, we did. Forecasts were living documents (in five tabs). We tracked cash burn on whiteboards. The budget was something I explained out loud more than I ever wrote down. Eventually, I realized that if we were […]