FP&A Stories

Hello Reader 👋 I still haven't taken any real time off this summer. Client sessions kept landing on the calendar, and somehow we're already in August. Here's what surprised me: I expected to slow down in this period. Instead, I've been working harder than usual, because summer weeks are exactly when there's space to think about the things that get buried during the busy period. When I was in FP&A, that longer-term thinking almost always came back to my team. How to develop them, how to give...

Hello Reader 👋 This week has been quieter than usual, and I've used it well. A bit of time for myself, some longer-term thinking, and prepping for my busy season the same way I'd tell you to prepare a budget: early, deliberately, before the pressure hits. Because budget season is coming, and with it comes something every FP&A leader knows too well. Meetings. Dozens of them, stacked back to back, most starting with good intentions and ending up being inefficient. I know them, you know them,...

Hello Reader 👋 Last week I was back in Amsterdam, running a workshop for the Netherlands teams of Roche. Honestly, at this point I should just get an apartment there 😄. There was a point that came in the discussion that I've heard since I started working in FP&A (actually, even before that): how far do we actually go in taking a position? The "classic" finance doctrine says we present the data and let the business find its own root cause and next step. And in a way, that's not entirely wrong...

Hello Reader 👋 I took the Eurostar to London this Monday. In the queue at the boarding platform, a man tried to sneak past the line. Just as if he had somewhere more important to be. Which is already a mystery to me, because we all have assigned seats on the train so nobody gains anything by pushing to the front except the mild irritation of everyone around them. A woman stopped him, politely, firmly, without raising her voice. The logic was so obvious, the tone so calm, that the man turned...

Hello Reader 👋 Twenty years ago, I was sitting next to Vincent in an amphitheatre at ICHEC Brussels. We were presenting a joint paper on corporate law. Two students doing their best to look like they knew what they were talking about. Last week, Vincent invited me to his cybersecurity firm, and I taught storytelling to his team of experts. I expected it to feel completely lost, me the expert for finance. But within the first hour, I recognised something I have seen in every finance team I...

Hello Reader 👋 Last week, I was almost at the end of a workshop with a finance team when something completely changed in the atmosphere. It became a discussion table about a fear they all had. A very specific, very physical fear of walking into the ExCo and presenting results to a group of executives who would, almost inevitably, push back. I've seen this before. But this time it was particularly intense. Almost the entire group described the same feeling: the one that, no matter how prepared...

Hello Reader 👋 Last weekend, I went to see an old friend. He has been in FP&A for over a decade, made it to Head of FP&A, and lately has been feeling like he has learned everything there is to learn in his field. His conclusion: time for a full career change. I have nothing against that. I completely changed my own career four and a half years ago, and I would do it again. But I wanted to understand whether he had actually explored everything his role could be, before deciding he had seen it...

Hello Reader 👋 Last week I was in France for a client session. I always enjoy going there. The food, the energy, the conversations. But this time, something unexpected happened before I even got to the workshop. I arrived at the hotel after a long drive. The parking was supposed to cover 24 hours but the ticket I got started before my arrival. I asked the receptionist to understand the situation. What followed was one of the most frustrating interactions I have had in a long time. Not because...

Hello Reader 👋, New week, new YouTube video. A while ago, I tested Copilot in PowerPoint. And to be fair, at the time it was impressive: generating slides automatically and quickly felt like a big step forward. But as we move forward with AI, the bar is rising quickly. And today, I don’t think we can really be satisfied with what Copilot delivers anymore, especially for finance presentations. So I ran a new test. This time comparing Copilot with Claude inside PowerPoint. The difference was...