“If your forecast only works when you believe in it, it’s not a forecast—it’s a faith-based initiative.” It started with a spreadsheet.Doesn’t it always? One column of “Actuals,” one column of “Plan,” and a third column that looked like it was about to ghost me. That’s where VLOOKUP lived—dragged across 400 rows, promising to unite […]
Let’s be honest — no one wakes up thinking, “Today’s the day I completely lose my grip on reality because of a spreadsheet.” And yet, here we are.Because Excel doesn’t just store numbers.It stores your soul. In FP&A, shortcuts are supposed to make you faster.Instead, they just accelerate the moment you realize your life’s work […]
Most companies don’t scale because they lack capital. They stall because they never designed an operating system strong enough to handle the weight of growth. And the finance team? They’re often the last to get one. Instead of operating like a product org with sprints and a clear roadmap, or like sales with a CRM […]
There’s a silent saboteur inside every FP&A forecasting process. Not bias.Not bad inputs.Not even the politics. It’s time. Not as in timing—that’s obvious.As in calendar drift: the misalignment between when things are supposed to happen and when they actually do. At first glance, it looks like nothing. Your sales team says Q3 will close $4M.Great—you […]
There’s a secret weapon most CFOs underuse.It’s not a model. Not a dashboard. Not even a board slide.It’s language. This isn’t about jargon or spin.This is about narrative clarity—the kind that turns raw data into decisions.The kind that aligns departments before they drift.The kind that moves the board before the market does. This post unpacks […]
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 […]
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, […]
The traditional budgeting process is broken. We know it, we live with it, and every December or January, we perform the same ritual — copy last year’s numbers, slap on a 3% increase, and call it strategic planning. That’s not strategy. That’s spreadsheet theater. As someone who has spent years entrenched in M&A integration, post-acquisition […]
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 […]
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