FP&A Today

How I learned to love FP&A again – Annette deYoung

Annette DeYoung, Principal Solutions Consultant at Datarails, is an accountant-turned FP&A manufacturing leader. She has deep experience in leading finance teams at manufacturing companies including Berner Food and Beverage, Rockford Products, Fairbanks Morse Engine, and JL Clark. It was at JL Clark, as Director of FP&A, that Annette implemented FP&A Solution, Datarails to mop up inefficiencies and end drain all-late night sessions at the finance department— she  liked the product so much she ended up joining the company and has since spoken to more than 1000 FP&A professionals seeking to love FP&A again by removing tedious repetitive processes.
In this episode 
Why I fell in love with manufacturing and finance over my career 
How creativity drew me from accounting to FP&A
Why a hard-coded accountant attitude was difficult to reconcile with more creative FP&A 
How to create finance business partnerships on the manufacturing floor 
Why I brought Datarails into my finance team at JL Clarke 
The future of Excel in FP&A
Is finance (finally) making a move with AI? 
The power of getting out of your comfort zone in finance 
Connect with Annette on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahdeyoung/

May the FP&A Be with you: a hero’s journey from Pixar, Lucasfilm, and LinkedIn (with Craig Barry)

Craig Barry has held senior finance roles at some of the most iconic companies in tech and entertainment, including LinkedIn, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Electronic Arts. At LinkedIn, he led central forecasting, supported more than 10 acquisitions, and played a key role in the company’s integration with Microsoft before becoming Head of FP&A at BioRender- building FP&A from the ground up helping the company scale ARR from $18 million to $50 million. Now Barry is principal consultant at ClearSightIQ.
In this episode 
My winding road to strategic finance 
Junior FP&A Analyst position at Electronic Arts as my first break 
Cost center focus in creative industries at EA with $3b sales
LucasFilm (pre-Disney) run as a sole proprietorship by George Lucas 
Pixar head of finance for their Canadian operations and production planning 
LinkedIn and focus on “revenue, revenue, revenue”
FP&A focus on modeling for acquisitions at LinkedIn and “virtual” P&Ls
Strategy for building out FP&A from scratch at BioRender 
My fractional CFO life 

FP&A from Fortune 100 to Scrappy Startups – Mike Dion

Mike Dion works at a Fortune 100 company. He has previously worked as a finance leader at Verizon-as well as startups and as a mentor to  enterprise giants to scrappy startups—unlocking tens of millions of dollars in value across industries like Entertainment and Telecom.  He does this through Mike’s F9 Finance:  a no nonsense website and newsletter (with 20k subscribers) passing on the skills that have accelerated his career, providing a guide to new tools (based on his experience automating 100,000 hours of labour) and secrets to promotion. He tells Glenn Hopper: “Three things, increasing revenue, decreasing expenses, and making your leaders look good. Those are the three things that move your career, not the reports, not the forecast tools to get to that.”
In this episode 
Passion in media and entertainment 
putting in our first consolidated planning system
At Verizon starting a center of Excellence (after facing a situation where 40 VPs wanted 30 decks based on Excel files   
Lack of approachable finance content: introducing Mike’s F9 Finanance   
Secrets to dynamic modeling and scenario planning 
3 Ways teams are getting overwhelmed with forecasts  
Better prompting and my relationship with AI
A completely new answer for Fave Excel Function
F9 Finance: https://www.f9finance.com/ 
F9 Finance YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance

Tech, Talent, Tariffs, and Taxes

FP&A Today goes on the road!. Our host city is Boston and the historic Harvard Club with an audience of Boston CFOs and FP&A leaders. Our first live recording sees an all-star panel of Jack McCullough, CFO Leadership Council, Michael Bayer, CFO of Wasabi Technologies, Cathy Yang, CFO Trexon. 
By way of background, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, talked of “remarkably high” levels of economic uncertainty. “I don’t know anyone who has a lot of confidence in their forecast,” he said. FactSet, a financial-data firm, found that over half of the companies in America’s S&P 500 index cited tariffs in their earnings calls—more than in any other time over the past decade.
In this episode we probe how finance executives can navigate today’s complex geopolitical and technological landscape including: 
The ROI of a CFO AI Strategy  
How to navigate as a financial leader with tariffs and trade tensions
Trexon’s Experience navigating tariffs affecting 12 business units and 16 sites
Tech and AI’s role in enhancing supply chain visibility 
Pricing increases for customers due to tariffs and navigating that from the CFO’s Office 
Back to work or not for finance teams?
The future of accounting

Pitch Perfect Board Presentations – CFO Shannon Nash

Shannon Nash is a chief financial officer, board director, investor, attorney, filmmaker, and CPA. She sits on the boards of Net Scout systems, Lazy Dog restaurants, and Sofi Bank, and most recently was CFO at Wing, the Alphabet-owned drone delivery company, and one of the hottest companies in the US. Here, she reveals the secrets FP&A professionals need to know about presenting to the Board and how to turn numbers into a narrative to advance to CFO and beyond
Explaining the power of the Board to shape a company’s strategy
The finance of film-making and my experience making a major new documentary
 The power of  FP&A in securing $150 million in funding at Reputation.com  
Presenting to boards -what drives us crazy
How improv training unexpectedly revolutionized her executive communication style
Connect with Shannon on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonknash
Watch On Board documentary: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/onboardthefilm

AI must look for work your finance team hates to do – Hyoun Park

CEO and Principal Analyst at Amalgam Insights, Hyoun Park helps CIOs & CFOs create the ROI and strategic business cases for better AI and IT FinOps. He is also host of the weekly podcast, This Week in Enterprise Tech.
In this episode Hyoun discusses some of the quick AI wins for finance departments.
My journey Starting as a CRM administrator to analyst 
Cloud spend getting out of control (unexpected cloud bills for $20m!)
AI use cases: invoices, contracts, billing and spending contracts (dealing with 1000 software contracts) and reconciliations
Agentic AI and uses in Finance 
Zero based budgeting and Forecasting in the AI age 
ROI for AI investment
People who will lose their jobs in AI in finance vs those who will survive  
My futurist prediction 
Connect with Hyoun on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hyounpark/
Host of weekly podcast, This week in Enterprise Tech: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034
 http://www.amalgaminsights.com/

Getting to a great Controller FP&A Relationship – Bill Hanna

With nearly 300k subscribers on YouTube, Bill Hanna’s weekly videos on The Financial Controller Channels provide his audience with lessons over a 15-year career in Auditing & Corporate Accounting. He provides inspiration and practices in accounting and finance through his videos and courses “Designed To Save You Years of Learning” (as one reviewer wrote “I have learnt more with you than 3 years studying accounting and finance”).
In this episode:
How I stumbled into accounting 
Lessons in accounting leadership 
The power of mentoring teams about mistakes I make
FP&A vs controller 
The accounting crisis affecting the CFO’s Office  
My accidental influencer journey 
Bringing practical explanation of concepts through one company followed across the course
The accounting concepts needed to get to CFO
Having a wife who is also an accountant 
Being a Mac user using Excel 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-hanna-cpa-7653a851/YouTube channel (Financial Controller) https://www.youtube.com/@TheFinancialController
Courses: https://controller-academy.com/

Damon Fletcher, ex-CFO of Tableau, on Great Analytics

Today’s guest is perhaps the leading CFO name in data and analytics, the ex-CFO of Tableau and DataRobot. Now as Founder & CEO at Caliper, Fletcher draws on over a decade of executive experience at the intersection of finance and analytics. At Caliper, his mission is transform cloud cost and usage data into actionable insights
In this episode Fletcher discusses 
The relationship between analytics and the CFO
Subscription, net dollar retention, customer retention, and annual recurring revenue as key metrics 
Getting from CFO to CEO and the learning curve 
How we rely on AI and predictive ML and seasonal patterns to find anomalies
Getting to base analytics and starting in AI
Challenges and waste with cloud and holding engineers accountable
The opportunity to  save 30% on cloud spend
Moving from Excel to Google Sheets
Connect with Damon LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/damon-fletcher-bb8a6614/
https://calipersoftware.ai

From a deep struggle with personal skills to Storytelling Leader

Walmart, Kraft Heinz, Blue Rock Therapeutics, and the Four Seasons hotels are just some of companies that  regularly invite Ron Monteiro to coach their finance teams in storytelling. But Ron’s success followed decades of fear in presenting and public speaking in FP&A settings. Starting in accounting at Hitachi (“Ron Monteiro: “it was actually the only job I could get”) the CPA and CMA was inspired by a manager who gave him direction and mentorship doing FP&A as Kraft, as well as work over a decade in daily overcoming his debilitating fears. Now he delivers a playbook to teams across the world where finance is “expected to be at the table, not just tactically, but strategically.”Ron is also the author of a new book: Love Mondays which draws on his experience and interviews with finance leaders.  
In this episode 
Fear of public speaking I’ve carried through my life 
Kraft Foods and a leap of faith from my manager
15 years at Kraft with 7 jobs and five promotions including FP&A manager, analyst and director 
Transforming Kraft FP&A into strategic value: Kraft Singles and “Getting Our Shit Together” meetings
Brendan Flynn’s leadership of finance at Kraft developing future finance leaders 
The downward trend of FP&A post 3G Capital’s buyout 
CPG and the essential metrics 
Learning what you can do to grow – listening tour as business partnering and putting your hand up
Love Mondays! A Proven Process to Bring Joy Back Into Your Work Week and Life Paperback by Ron Monteiro https://www.amazon.ca/Love-Mondays-Proven-Process-Bring/dp/B0DPMTVYY3

The Consolidation King on Working Better with FP&A – Charaf Bourhalla

“Consolidation. A  lot of people don’t know exactly what it is. They think that it’s just an aggregation of numbers. Like you just add numbers, but it’s more technical than that. Most of the time when we are talking about consolidation, it’s international big groups that have subsidiaries around the world. Consolidation is the process of converting those financial statements normally built locally, because they have to be compliant with the local requirements and be compliant with the GAAP of the group.”
Charaf Bourhalla has been Head of Consolidation at Nestle Skin Health, Vimian Group and Edify Investment Partner.  He holds several key certifications, including the FMVA from CFI, ACCA with a focus on IFRS, and the PMP from PMI. His posts on LinkedIn reach millions of people explaining complex topics simply such as IFRS 10 – Consolidated Financial Statements, AS 16 – Property, Plant and Equipment and AS 1 – Presentation of Financial Statements.
In this episode:
From years of struggle, to Kimberly Clarke as a reporting analyst to entering a pharma company as business controller 
13-year tenure as a consultant developing a deep understanding of IFRS, USGAAP, French GAAP, and IPSAS, 
3 Jobs as Head of Consolidation including Nestle Skin Health with 70 subsidiaries around the world
Simplifying complexities of financial consolidation and non financial KPIs
Secrets to working with FP&A for consolidation and forecasting and building a mid-term plan
Continual training for teams in subsidiaries 
Technology and complexity changing the consolidation game
How Charaf called in when a company found itself consolidating more than 70  legal entities using Excel
Not to pick consultants with partnerships with only one provider 
Connect with Charaf on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charaf-bourhalla-04760a1b/