FP&A Today

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From Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to Energy Transformation: Connagh Hopkins Jul 22, 2025

Show notes

Connagh Hopkins is Head of Business Planning and Reporting at Western Power, one of Australia’s largest electricity network operators. Connagh shares her fascinating and unconventional journey from working on the global licensing for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to navigating Australia’s energy transformation.

In this episode:

Who Wants To be a Millionaire success (powered by Lotus123)
The Consolidated 10 year plan at Western Power
Scenario planning and Inflation challenges in utilities
How we are stacked: 65 person finance team at Western Power
The power and challenge of AI in finance

Connect with Connagh Hopkins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connagh-hopkins-a9b3871/

Connagh Hopkins is Head of Business Planning and Reporting at Western Power, where she oversees the FP&A function for one of Australia’s largest electricity network operators. With more than two decades of experience across utilities, property development, not-for-profit, retail, fuel, and media sectors in both the UK and Australia, she’s known for her focus on commercial strategy, cross-functional collaboration, and building high-performance finance teams.

CFO Grammarly – behind their $1 billion in non-dilutive financing and how we do FP&A Jul 17, 2025

Show notes

Matt Hudson became CFO of Grammarly – the popular writing assistant tool – after the company acquired Coda (a productivity tool)- of which he was a founding member. Now as CFO at Grammarly he is overseeing rapid change at the company which has over 40 million daily active users and $700m in revenue (and a 50 person finance team). Finance is helping pioneer a company vision of AI redefining every business application and workflow, “reinventing productivity”. To this end, in May 2025, Grammarly raised $1 billion in non-dilutive financing from General Catalyst to fund sales and marketing costs and strategic acquisitions. Since then, Grammarly acquired email startup Superhuman (July 2025). You sense more is coming.

In this episode

Grammarly $1billion non-diluted growth investment explained
Being a founding member of Coda (acquired by Grammarly)
How my product expertise plugs into finance
Joining YouTube when it was around $140million in revenue to $3billion by the time I left ( $36 billion today)
Will CFOs see an explosion of costs because of AI
FP&A set up at Grammarly and biggest KPIs
Bonding over a love of Chili’s

Why Financial models are essential even at early stages of a company – Lauren Pearl Jul 13, 2025

Show notes

Lauren Pearl is a Business Strategist and CFO Advisor who helps startup teams build data-driven businesses. The 3x founder with over 13 years of startup leadership experience now serves as CFO, advisor, and instructor for over 300 growing companies. She also runs the podcast “Growth Minded CFO” and offers a free course on financial modeling.

In this episode:

Financial models at startups
Sniffing out BS at startups
Storytelling as a pitchdeck
Getting startups to engage with finance
Free financial modeling course
Being a punk band roadie
Functionality of Excel

Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenepearl/

Daily CFO newsletter: https://www.laurenpearlconsulting.com/newsletter

What Keeps Excel as the heart of business: Chandoo Jul 03, 2025

Show notes

Today’s guest barely needs an introduction. Purna Duggirala (aka, “Chandoo”) is a celebrity in Excel circles. Since 2004, Chandoo has been regularly sharing everything he learns working with Excel training hundreds of finance teams, and had roles including as Data Lead, Remuneration Modeling & Analytics for the New Zealand government.

The 16-time Microsoft MVP runs Chandoo.org , which aims to “make you awesome in Excel and Power BI” getting 250,000 visitors per month from all over the world and his YouTube channel has 750,000 subscribers. His stated goal is “to make you awesome at Excel and Power BI”, and produces the go-to Excel resources from blog posts and videos to full online courses.

My Excel Journey and Community building
Skill gaps in FP&A Teams
Power BI vs Excel vs Python
Copilot – advantages and limits
My favorite Excel function

Check out https://chandoo.org

Chandoo’s Free Data analyst course: https://chandoo.org/wp/free-data-analyst-course/

Connect with Chandoo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/purnaduggirala/

Top 10 Burning Questions in FP&A Jun 23, 2025

Show notes

In this special episode Glenn is joined by Nate Saperia to answer the 10 most burning questions in FP&A. Nate brings nearly 20 years of finance experience including at Accordion, Spruce Finance, Hess Corporation and GE. At Saperia Consulting Nate specializes in real-time dashboards, financial planning, and interim CFO/FP&A leadership.

The questions:

Q1: How can I use AI in FP&A?

Q2: What do you think of FP&A solutions?

Q3: How can you get to driver based decision making

Q4: Fastest levers FP&A teams can pull with margin pressures rising?

Q5: How can an FP&A function trust the financial data it’s using when it doesn’t control the data?

Q6: Should the CTO or CFO own the data?

Q7. Skills to get from M&A Financial due diligence to FP&A?

Q8. FP&A Internship, what advice?

Q9. Things I wish I had known earlier in FP&A?

Q10. What’s the future of Excel in FP&A?

FP&A "Wow" Moments at $10m companies Jun 19, 2025

Show notes

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

Data Analytics and AI for FP&A Teams Jun 12, 2025

Show notes

This special episode formed part of FP&A 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

Packed insights for Excel in FP&A: Jeff Gudim Jun 08, 2025

Show notes

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/

Data Science masterclass with Shifra Isaacs May 28, 2025

Show notes

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/

Curiosity, Ambition, Service: FP&A at Dashlane May 21, 2025

Show notes

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/

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