FP&A Today

Australian-born Luke Mulcahy started in FP&A at larger businesses including Coates Group (internet leader in Sydney) and manufacturing company Sherwin-Williams. But for nearly 4 years he has loved having “wow” moments of finance insights with smaller companies. closer to the $5-10million range, where powerful insights are taken straight from finance to the CFO. In his words: “You can have those moments a lot more frequently with small business owners and just tell them what they’re, what they’re missing, what they haven’t got eyes on.” In this episode: * Forecasting energy consumption for a utility company in Australia * The fear and strategy of becoming a fractional CFO  * The ideal set up for FP&A in small businesses  * Why big companies often have big data problems (and cleaning that data) * Big FP&A wins in small business * Solving the date problem in Excel

This special episode formed part of FP&A Con 2025 [https://www.datarails.com/events/fpa-con-2025/] which saw a record-breaking 1500 registrants.  The guests: Nathan Bell, Managing Partner, VAi Consulting, is among the most in-demand experts. Bell has unique experience– having started in computer science, before leading finance teams at Native American Bank, Digital Media Trends and Gartner– where he advised hundreds of FP&A teams facing chaotic data situations). Anna Tioma former CFO of Sandoz and  Softeq. Most recently she has pivoted to become a fractional CFO at Blend2Balance.  Anna Yamashita, Solutions Consulting at Data Rails who has worked across SAS finance throughout her career where she helps FP&A teams implement modern performance management solutions. In this session:  * How AI is being applied in real FP&A workflows today  * Predictive analytics as the gold standard * Getting to a single version of truth with AI  * ROI in AI  * Mastering Data Management  * Misconceptions about AI in finance and security  * Co-pilot, prompts * Bonus: Security and AI

This episode is 53 minutes packed with practical Excel insights for an FP&A practitioner and Excel advocate at the top of his game. Jeff Gudim is a senior financial analyst, Excel evangelist and hardcore financial model architect at Strategic Education, listed on the NASDAQ and which owns for-profit, online Capella University and Strayer University, Jeff made the leap from private wealth management to corporate FP&A, leveraging his financial planning skills and Excel skills rising up as a data-driven problem solver. Jeff  leads forecasting and analysis for a hundred million dollars IT function.  In this episode * Getting from private wealth management to FP&A * How Excel jumpstarted my career  * My favorite ever Excel model  * Monte Carlo simulations  * 3 time saving tips every FP&A professional needs  * Dynamic arrays and Lambda functions and “fundamental” Excel change How to convince your team to use advanced Excel Completely new favorite Excel function or feature Connect with Jeff Gudim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-gudim-7a994546/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-gudim-7a994546/]

In this masterclass Shifra Isaacs, developer Relations Advocate at Ascend.io, delves into her experience as data scientist, technical writer, and support lead providing fresh insights for FP&A and finance professionals. In this episode: * Data science vs business analytics  * Pulling data not yet able to be modeled  * Python for Excel  * The right models for risk scoring, variance analysis and forecasting  * Replicating a process with a new tool using AI * How can we survive in an AI first world Connect with Shifra Isaacs on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shifra-isaacs/

Taylor Otstot, Vice President Finance,  Dashlane joined GoDaddy (now a $30billion valued) domain registry, domain registrar and web hosting company before their IP. In 8 years he climbed to senior Director of Finance running an FP&A team of 14. From this experience and as VP Finance at DashLane he says he hires for 3 things: curiosity, ambition, and finance leaders who are service-oriented. “If you bring those three things to the table, you're able to wade through a lot of the ambiguity that comes with those decision making processes.” Also in this episode:  * Finance and FP&A as antidote to the machine of Big 4 * 3- 4 years in audit as the “perfect amount” * Getting to strategy in FP&A * Partnership vs accountability as a false choice for FP&A * Improv comedy having its moment in finance  * The Tarantino approach to finance presentations  Connect with Taylor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorotstot/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorotstot/] Subscribe to CFO Frameworks newsletter on Substack: https://www.cfoframeworks.com/ [https://www.cfoframeworks.com/]