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 budgets. The COO asked if Tableau could just “handle the modeling.”

By the end of the week, the company’s FP&A team was politely asked to “explore modernizing their toolset.”

The punchline? Within three weeks, the team was building their models—in PowerPoint.

And as ridiculous as that sounds, the story holds a mirror up to what I see happening across a lot of finance teams today.

So let’s break it down.

The Setup: Death by a Thousand “Modernization” Initiatives

The company? A well-funded Series D SaaS unicorn.

The FP&A team? Smart. Experienced. Strong modeling chops.

The problem? Leadership had developed a collective allergy to anything that looked “old school.”

It started innocently enough:

• The CFO wanted more “visually engaging” outputs for board decks.
• The CRO complained that Excel models “weren’t collaborative enough.”
• The CEO’s chief of staff suggested that “modern finance teams use dynamic dashboards.”

Pretty soon, Excel was on life support.

The Shift: From Models to Slides

Here’s how it actually played out:

By month three? Entire operating models were being built in PowerPoint tables. Yes, with manual calculations. Yes, copy-pasted. Yes, with version control managed via email chains.

And yes, it was a disaster.

The Warning Signs: How to Know You’re on This Path

I’ve seen this happen more than once. Here are the telltale signs:

1. Leadership starts optimizing for presentation over accuracy

When the primary feedback on your model is “Can we make this chart more on-brand?”

2. Decision-makers stop engaging with model drivers

If you hear “Just show me the summary slide,” you’re already in the danger zone.

3. BI tools are treated as replacements for modeling

Dashboards are great. But they’re not scenario engines.

4. Finance gets pushed to deliver in “collaborative formats”

Translation: Formats that are easy to screenshot, not formats that are built for decision-making.

5. Operators start bypassing Finance for modeling

Because the Finance outputs are now too sanitized to be useful.

Why This Happens: The Seduction of the Pretty Deck

The truth? A gorgeous slide deck is seductive. It makes the numbers feel polished. Digestible. Safe.

But the second you lose visibility into what’s driving those numbers, you’re flying blind.

As one FP&A lead put it to me: “We went from pilots to flight attendants. Smiling, serving up pre-packaged metrics, but not flying the plane anymore.”

What’s Lost: The Real Cost of Killing Excel

Here’s what the company actually lost in this shift:

In short? Finance ceded its seat at the strategy table.

The Underlying Issue: Misunderstanding What Modeling Is For

Too many leadership teams think modeling is about producing a pretty number.

It’s not. It’s about:

• Testing assumptions
• Understanding sensitivities
• Driving tradeoff decisions
• Preparing for uncertainty

And guess what? You can’t do that in PowerPoint.

A Better Way: Modernize How You Use Excel, Not Whether

I’m not anti-modernization. I teach teams how to do this the right way.

Here’s how:

1. Clean up your models

• Use Power Query to automate data pulls
• Structure models for transparency and flexibility
• Build scenario engines, not static forecasts

2. Separate calculation layer from presentation layer

• Do the modeling in Excel (or your modeling tool of choice)
• Drive the outputs into dashboards or board decks

3. Train leadership on how to engage with models

• Teach them to ask: “What’s driving this? What are the assumptions? What’s the sensitivity?”

4. Protect core modeling time

• Don’t let Finance become a slide factory
• Guard time for actual analysis and decision prep

Why This Matters: In Uncertainty, Speed of Insight Wins

Here’s the punchline:

The company I’m talking about? When the market turned six months later, they were caught flat-footed.

They couldn’t run new scenarios fast enough. They didn’t know which levers to pull. Operators stopped trusting the Finance numbers.

Eventually? They quietly rebuilt the Excel models. But by then, the credibility damage was done.

Don’t Throw Out the Toolbox

This article took real time to write because I want more CFOs and operators to see through the “modernization theater” that’s infecting too many Finance teams.

If you found value in it, please share.

And if you want to go deeper—whether it’s modernizing your modeling stack, building faster scenario engines, or up-leveling your team’s strategic impact—I offer 1:1 consulting for Finance pros ready to level up. DM me if you want to talk.

And I’ll leave you with this question:

If your board asked for three new downside scenarios today—could your team deliver by end of week?

If that makes you sweat—it’s time to fix it.

In this post, I’ll walk through the top 10 strategic FP&A principles that I believe—based on hard-won scars and quiet breakthroughs—can transform corporate financial planning into a long-horizon value engine. Not the kind of fluff you hear on earnings calls, but the kind that makes organizations resilient, aligned, and free from the tyranny of short-termism.

Principle 1: Kill the Budget (or at Least Loosen Its Grip)

If you’re still setting rigid annual budgets in Q4 and expecting them to hold up 10 months later, you’re doing it wrong. Budgets aren’t strategy—they’re constraints. Instead, adopt rolling forecasts and scenario planning that mirror actual market dynamics.

• Static budgets create false certainty
• Rolling forecasts build adaptability
• Scenario planning clarifies response options before crises hit

Principle 2: Shift from Reporting to Sensing

Most FP&A teams spend 70% of their time on backward-looking financial reporting and 30% explaining what already happened. Flip it. Use real-time data to sense early trends. Financial planning intelligence should be predictive, not just reflective.

• Invest in data infrastructure for real-time insights
• Build dashboards that flag leading indicators, not just lagging metrics
• Create feedback loops between operations and finance

Principle 3: Don’t Report Everything—Report What Matters

Too much financial data creates informational smog. Your job isn’t to recreate the data warehouse—it’s to distill what’s actionable. I once sat in on a monthly business review that had 115 slides. Only three changed any decisions.

Ask:

• Who is the audience?
• What do they need to know to act?
• What won’t we report—and why?

Principle 4: Build Models That Tell Stories, Not Just Numbers

A spreadsheet can show you variance. A good FP&A model explains why it happened, who it affects, and what’s likely to come next. When I started using narrative-style annotations in financial models, people finally stopped asking for more slides.

Principle 5: Align Incentives with Long-Term Outcomes

Short-term KPIs are like sugar. They’re cheap, addictive, and leave your organization crashing. Reframe incentives around strategic financial outcomes—customer retention, net present value of new initiatives, or operating margin over a 3-year horizon.

• Link compensation to long-term value creation, not quarterly wins
• Embed ESG and sustainability into financial planning and analysis
• Teach teams how to think in systems, not silos

Principle 6: Make Planning an Ongoing Dialogue, Not an Annual Ritual

Annual financial planning is often a lonely exercise. One team builds, another signs off, and then everyone forgets until next year. The alternative? Treat planning as a living dialogue across departments.

• Hold quarterly strategic alignment reviews
• Involve product, marketing, and ops in scenario planning
• Turn planning into decision-making, not documentation

Principle 7: Prioritize Drivers Over Outcomes

You can’t control revenue. You can control the number of qualified leads, the conversion rate, the churn rate, and your gross margin. These are your operational levers. Build your financial models around them—not just the outcomes they produce.

Focus on:

• Leading indicators vs lagging KPIs
• Controllable vs exogenous variables
• Strategy-linked assumptions and risk factors

Principle 8: Democratize Financial Literacy

Finance shouldn’t be a dark art. When more people understand the P&L and the tradeoffs behind capital allocation, better business decisions happen. This is the cheapest transformation you can make.

• Run profit & loss literacy workshops across departments
• Build self-service financial planning tools
• Replace finance jargon with actionable plain language

Principle 9: Marry Tech with Talent

No digital finance transformation survives contact with a talent gap. You can buy the best planning software on the planet, but if your FP&A team can’t interpret, challenge, and communicate what comes out of it, it’s useless.

• Upskill FP&A staff in data analysis, finance automation, and storytelling
• Hire financial translators: people who speak both numbers and business
• Don’t automate judgment—augment it

Principle 10: Elevate FP&A to a Strategic Business Partner

The real north star: FP&A as a strategy function, not just a cost center. This means your financial planning analysts earn their seat at the table—not just by being precise, but by being forward-thinking.

That means:

• Bringing opportunity costs into every conversation
• Framing decisions through capital efficiency and risk-adjusted returns
• Being the voice of long-term value—not just short-term constraints

Final Thoughts: Towards an FP&A Function That Thinks Like a Founder

If you take one thing away from this, let it be this: good FP&A doesn’t chase accuracy for its own sake. It uses data to illuminate uncertainty and build better business bets. It’s part economics, part psychology, part street smarts.

The companies I’ve seen win over the long run aren’t the ones with the tightest budgets. They’re the ones where finance dares to think like investors, align capital with mission, and measure success not by this quarter—but by the next decade.

And if that sounds radical—it’s because it is. But trust me: it works.