In this episode:

• Being at Fox Sports when live sports came screeching to a halt during COVID

• Show me the Money – managing the superbowl of FP&A at Fox Sports, Warner Bros and 2K and the power of ratings for finance

• How blowouts affect financial performance

• Uncovering the differences between Accounting vs FP&A at Fox Sports

• Why I chose the FP&A direction rather than a COO role

• Most important metrics in sports businesses

• Heavy fixed costs and the challenges of live broadcasting

• Huge tech, streaming and viewership changes in media/sports and entertainment – and how to forecast the future of the game for finance pros

• Metrics in game playing: and finance discussions about whether to put new features in a game

• Leading the Los Angeles chapter for women in sports and events

• Flying out to Prague six weeks into a new job at Warner Bros to fix a mess and the strategic resolution

• March Madness ‘Budget Season’ Challenge at Fox Sports – and why the loser has to do the waterfall charts

Returning guest CJ Gustafson –master of the hugely popular Mostly Metrics newsletter–delivers in his custom funny and frank style the lessons from his first year as CFO and the practical lessons for anyone in finance (and particularly FP&A).

• His worst budget experience - working six months on an operating plan thrown away within a week during COVID (and the surprising conclusion)

• Getting stamps on my finance passport getting me to CFO

• The biggest lessons on being a CFO-as removing blockers and letting an organization go faster.

• CFO as chief psychologist, chief contract signer, and chief risk officer

• How I prioritized my finance hires

• Views of FP&A as a CFO

• How knowing numbers better than anybody else projected me to CFO

• Why BI was put under the CFO function (“it’s like putting data insights on steroids and you combine FP&A and BI”)

• Why ARR per employee is my favorite SaaS metric

• CAC payback period as the golden SaaS metric

• How I (painfully) learned about the power of the “meeting before the meeting”

• Creating a category for yourself as CFO

We have an all-star panel getting into the Christmas and New Year spirit. Howard Tunnicliffe , Head of FP&A, The Economist, and Brett Hampson , Director of Finance, AllState, joining host Paul Barnhurst, The FPandA Guy in this special edition of FP&A Today .

They tackle the 12 most burning questions asked on reddit.com/r/FPandA in 2023. Mid-way, we give you the end-of-year results of the top 5 Favorite FP&A Functions for FP&A Pros, based on our 80 episodes!

12 Questions Answered on this special Holiday episode:

• How difficult is it for someone to switch industries in FP&A?

• Do you need a CPA to get an FP&A job?

• How easy is it for someone or hard to break into FP&A that has a non-traditional background?

• Any advice on how you run/lead the annual budgeting process?

• How do you get your first VP of FP&A role?

• How do you develop KPIs from scratch?

• How do you decide on when you should upgrade to an FP&A tool?

• BONUS!!! The results of Favorite Excel Function (from 80 episodes)

• What advice would you give about management reporting in a turnaround situation?

• Can you explain how the headcount process works for budgeting? How have you typically seen it work?

• If someone knows nothing about FP&A, any advice you’d offer on how to teach it or learn it? Where do you start?

• Is FP&A certification actually worth it?

• How do you de-stress, especially during budget season?

In this episode Taylor reveals the psychological skills and strategy he uses to win in his career.

• Printing Excel files (aka the worst budget he has ever experienced)

• Why every conversation in finance is really a conversation about tradeoffs?

• Letting go of what “made you great” when managing an FP&A Team

• Psychology learnings that have transformed my finance career and how you can apply them to your career

• Eight Lessons Learned the Hard Way, Reflection from Eight Years at GoDaddy.

• How a hard experience showed him that in finance, “ titles unlock doors, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be invited in”

• Why I am a big fan of decision frameworks and breaking out of your “normal default positions”

• Burritos vs tacos and finance decision-making (with lessons for business reviews and business partnerships)

• Why the “safe choice” isn’t normally the right choice in finance

• Secrets to building a high performing team

• The big Sales comp revelation

In this episode:

• From Wall Street to first-time CFO

• Running finance at Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and Oprah-TV hitmaker King World

• The skills needed to be a top CFO

• The 3 routes to CFO: Auditors, Wall Street or FP&A

• What Andy Gove OKR setting can teach us about budget setting

• What is the right percentage of time to hit budget goals?

• Balancing between Elon Musk (Papa Bear) and Charlie Munger (Mama Bear) in setting targets

• Giving people the opportunity to overachieve

• Best case/worst case/base case at Oracle

• The delicate balancing act of Wall Street guidance

• Using a stagger chart

• Why FP&A is so critical; how the biggest strategic decisions involve FP&A adviceRevisiting the processes as Oracle bought Sun Microsystems

• Merger integration strategy worked on our sales compensation

• Truck drivers and sales commission – a must-listen-to story

• How in 1983, at the Washington Post, I learned from Warren Buffet and ended up scrambling to buy 4 shares of Berkshire Hathaway. Guess how much it’s worth now?

Ed Hyer, CPA , as VP FP&A at Verizon , built one of the most ambitious centers of excellence (COEs) undertaken in finance.

Put simply, a center of excellence centralizes similar types of work into a single entity. While relatively common for payroll functions or “back-end transactional work”, FP&A presented an altogether bigger challenge for the COE concept.

The creation of Verizon’s Center of Excellence at the $134 billion revenue 118,000 employee company counts as one of the most audacious challenges undertaken in FP&A–ultimately comprising 175 professionals, took more than a year to complete and fanning through 24 different waves of transformation to take effect. Though the impetus from the beginning was to prove the concept could work, Verizon's FP&A COE has now transformed the business in impactful and unexpected ways.

“I remember one case, where someone showed there were 16 different processes here. He said he could get it down to two, and I've just saved myself six hours on workday one. It didn't require any new tools or technology.

In this must-listen to episode Hyer reveals the secret of Verizon’s FP&A transformation.

One of the myths I'd love to dispel is that nonprofits are not strategic. People think we aren’t forward-thinking or just scrapping for change and trying to get things done. I've had the honor of working with organizations where we really focus on our mission in a nonprofit context in a very strategic way.”

You don’t want to miss this masterclass with Amy Omand . Omand is Fractional CFO, at 7 Seat Consulting, working with not-for-profits getting from early to mid-stage growth. In this episode, she reveals her journey from managing FP&A at Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream (bought by Nestle) to former CFO of New Schools Venture Fund and setting up her business focused on not-for-profits.

In this episode:

• Dreyer's ice cream Budgeting Experience - the problems that can melt financial analysis with a new ice cream line launch

• Passion for K12 education and the finance factor in education

• The differences-and similarities- between nonprofit and "for profit" FP&A

• Why cash is (still) king at nonprofits

• Restrictions placed on how money is spent by nonprofits

• Taking Revolution Foods, a Healthy School Lunch Company, through their first B Corporation certification

• Why Metallica works best for budget and modeling

Christian Martinez, Finance Analytics Manager at Kraft Heinz is an in-demand Conference Speaker and specialist who teaches a top-rated course, with (previous guest) Nicolas Boucher. In this episode discover the secrets about game changing uses of AI and Python for your FP&A career.

“We’re in the same era as when Excel was first invented,” says Martinez “There were people still using calculators and pens while others shifted to Excel and dramatically improved performance.”

In this episode:

• Why Python and Excel together at long last as a “game changer” for FP&A

• “Explainable” AI in FP&A

• How AI is improving overall budgets and forecasting

• Can non-data science people jump right in with AI?

• Getting comfortable being uncomfortable

• His path to a “boutique” course teaching practical application of AI in FP&A

• Why the best way to fully learn something is to teach it

• The most awesome uses of AI in FP&A

• How Gen AI is going to change FP&A in 2024

• Waterfall charts in Excel

In this episode:

• Kulkarni’s path from Data analytics to FP&A as Senior Manager of FP&A at eBay – business partnering with the Merchandising / Shipping & Logistics Business and Product Teams. Followed by his career at Adobe.

• Moving from analytics to FP&A and why it is a perfect route

• Four proven pillars to become a successful FP&A professional

• The tested formula to get a seat at the table in finance

• My framework for analyzing data to get the juiciest insights – SCQA framework explained

• My aha moment in FP&A automating ecommerce/holiday space reports

• Tabla playing and love of Indian classical music

• Steve Jobs and what we can learn about his relentless desire to understand the consumer

• The SCQA framework explained by Parth

This follows one of our most popular ever episodes (episode 19: Budgeting all your questions answered). In this sequel episode, new and returning guests answer all your new burning budget and forecasting questions and challenges. Joining us in the budget and forecasting war-room are:

Alejandra Boggione , FP&A Manager and Senior Business Controller, FASTA

Andrew Childress , FP&A Solutions Consultant Datarails (ex finance at Accupac, One Inc and Flint Group)

Annette DeYoung MBA 🇮🇱 , Senior FP&A Solutions Consultant, Datarails (ex finance at JL Clark, Berner Food & Beverage, Fairbanks Morse Engine)

Some of the questions tackled in this LinkedIn Live episode of FP&A Today (November 2023):

• What’s budgeting and forecasting good for?

• How do you approach budgeting in consulting firms?

• Which type of budget process works best (top down or bottom up?)

• How can FP&A be the bridge between the two?

• How does the budget work in a startup?

• What is the linkage between forecasting and the model?

• How can finance best prepare for the budget ahead of time to avoid crazy late nights?

• Revisiting the previous year’s budget – (what can be cut)?

• How can you ensure alignment between the financial plan and operational plan?

• Static annual budget versus a rolling forecast?

• How do budgets help with inflation challenges?

• How do you kickstart scenario planning?

• How often should you reforecast?

From Camp Taji in Iraq, to Will Wheaton’s narration of Ready Player One, this is the story of Frank Aburto who helped build Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) at Audible .

Frank Aburto, senior Director of Finance, leads strategic finance and FP&A at Audible the audio storytelling subsidiary of Amazon.

In his role, Aburto supports more than 150 partners across marketing and product where the FP&A function has been central to Audible's success in reaching millions of listeners around the world and becoming the largest player in the audiobook market (sales of audiobooks hit $1.8 billion in the US alone in 2022).

Airbase , a spend management company currently processes over $5 billion of annual payments on behalf of finance teams. It is a pain point Vallurupalli is all too aware of. "Moving to Airbase solved a challenge I had personally experienced at previous companies were there were 65 or 70 physical [credit]cards in a 300-person company and spend was not controlled. There was no way to forecast when someone was thinking of using a physical card, which was for anything at that time".

CFO Aneal Vallurupalli joins Paul, on Datarails ' podcast FP&A Today , to talk about what CFOs increasingly require from the best-in-class FP&A, based on his experiences in finance and financial planning and analysis at previous companies, stretching from series A companies to public companies.