I have a strong opinion about building an FP&A function from scratch: Don’t start by hiring FP&A people. I realize this is an inconvenient opening for an article about building an FP&A function. But I’ve seen companies decide they need FP&A and immediately jump to the org chart. We need a Director. Maybe two analysts. […]
I have a slightly inconvenient habit in Finance. When the numbers are bad, I ask questions. When the numbers are good, I ask more questions. Revenue is $800,000 ahead of forecast? Great. Why? Gross margin improved three points? Wonderful. What happened? Cash collections suddenly accelerated? Now I’m suspicious. This is probably not the personality trait […]
One of the more curious things I’ve noticed over the years is that budgets are often approved long before anyone walks into the conference room. That sounds ridiculous, of course. The meeting is on everyone’s calendar. The deck is polished. The assumptions have been circulated. People ask questions. Slides get skipped. Someone inevitably says, “Let’s […]
And Somewhere, an FP&A Model Just Started Lying The number dropped.Below 200,000. Cue the headline writers polishing the word resilient like it’s a participation trophy. But if you work in FP&A, that number doesn’t mean “things are fine.”It means nothing is giving way. And nothing costs more than pressure that refuses to release. The number […]
In 2025, I was nominated for a Datarails Office of the CFO Award. I made a joke at the time that it was the closest thing Finance had to the Oscars. I still think that is funny, mostly because our red carpet would be a hallway outside a conference room and somebody would be asking […]
Every CFO has lived this nightmare: You spend weeks on the annual plan.By March, it’s useless. The issue isn’t poor forecasting. It’s that traditional planning cycles weren’t designed for today’s pace. Forecasts die young because the tools are static while reality is dynamic. This article breaks down a new solution: AI-powered forecasting prompts that keep […]
The first time I killed the old annual planning cycle, I thought I was solving my biggest headache. No more department wish lists stacked like Jenga blocks.No more 80-page plans that went stale by March.No more pretending the future was predictable. I rebuilt the system into something alive: driver-based, rolling, and operator-ready. And for about […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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