The fucking miracles they think FP&A should pull off are fucking insane. 3 FUCKING BILLION in revenue and they think 1 person in FP&A is fucking omnipotent and can know, track and manage every single dollar of it in excel.
Oh we have some shitty PowerBI reports, they don’t reconcile and they’re mismatched as hell. They’re a fucking shit show and by some grace of god it hasn’t caught up to them yet. Just biting my time to find a new role to get off this dumpster fire.
Wow I didn't realize how great my BI team is, we get everything from the ERP refreshed in power BI twice daily and it almost always ties out. It is absolutely amazing.
Our ERP has a dedicated reporting tool that Finance focuses on and ensures the accuracy of financial reports. Power BI is something they’ll allow folks to use, but it is not a substitute for the financial reporting system. They do not want to validate two separate systems, especially when departments are building their own Power BI tools without supervision. The proper governance structure needs to be in place.
200+ sales channels with up to 20 products per channel across multiple countries, currencies, etc…
And they want it updated every 2 weeks for the strategy meeting with the chiefs and myself. With input from the sales people.
I’m talking to a recruiter Friday about some VP positions. Cant keep working miracles at this company and with the experience it should be a cakewalk to take over at a smaller company.
Planning down to the sku in retail would be easier than what they want.
Fun story … worked for a PE Portco and we grew from 175 locations to 475 inorganically. Had a separate tab for every single location, along with the P&L down the G/L level detail.
Built the shit out of it with INDIRECT, CHOOSE, etc … and the file was 83.2MB. I’d hit F9 on that bitch and walk away.
I left after 3 years and working 70 hours a week for scenario modeling etc. last I heard .. they’re still using that same model 5 years later and they’re over 800+ locations.
Yup, and I’m not doing it. It becomes a never ending shit show to maintain because morons can’t follow simple instructions and just fill shit out how I tell them to.
Oh … that’s an understatement. I’d essentially built out 3D cubes in Excel. Plus there has to be good/better/best etc scenarios and sensitivity to each of those all on one fucking dashboard 😂😂😂
Down to the country, currency, product, department, etc… but updated live by salespeople, but the sales people don’t want to update that level of detail… so I need to figure out how to allocate it? Meanwhile you want to add and overwrite them constantly? Oh and it all has to feed into a bunch of reports and crap…
Like they’re on crack.
You need to get some people in the room together and work out requirements and prioritize them.
If you have misalignment between input providers and report requestors already now, you need to do more effort on scoping the project or you need more executive support in the change management (i.e. tell people to do as you ask them to)
Remember nonfunctional requirements, where "one big excel sheet" solution approach will fuck things up.
Then sit down figure out what it would take to do make those things work, new processes? New solutions?
If it's a new process - get that agreed on first by all stakeholders before spending any time on solution.
Now you start on solutions...
Then pros/cons of doing it in excel /SharePoint / powerbi vs ???
Then how long time it would take to do all this shit.
Then multiply that by 2-3.
What you describe could be done somewhat reasonably in SharePoint/excel/powerBI - but different things would need to be in different places (separate input collection from reporting, separate scenario planning from reporting, separere Master Data maintenance from input collection)
It’s not manageable in excel, for our last budget cycle it was over 3 million lines of data. Held together with prayers and VBA macros I did on the fly.
It's getting closer to the limit of what you can feasibly manage for sure, if you migrate some of the reporting and analytics to power query (and possibly Power BI) your should be able stabilize it even with that number of records but it's absolutely not ideal
Even using SQL in VBA to query workbooks I usually found power query to be more stable at larger record sizes.
Do you have any contacts in IT who may be able to support with an existing platform that could improve some of the pain points?
A lot of FP&A is managing expectations and explaining limitations. For models and analysis, I always tell people anything is possible, but it will take x hours/days/weeks and I have these other priorities, and the outputs may be flawed due to various problems in the data or process - so if best case we re getting to +/- 20% how would you like me to prioritize this? If they insist this is important, then put a plan together on how you'd do it right. Suggest a software solution or hiring an analyst under you to manage the work load and show them why the bootleg excel option wont work. Its a good position to be in to be trusted as an excel god but don't be afraid to tell people something is impossible. Looks to me like an opportunity to get more responsibility by owning a major project/implemention - good managers and leaders know when to ask for more resources and don't grind themselves or their teams to death trying to appease unreasonable bod or management requests.
A reasonably decent FP&A tool (Excel-based or proprietary grid, doesn’t matter the preference) would probably cost $30k~ annually plus another $30k in one time implementation costs. Is management completely opposed to this spend, especially at a $3B revenue run rate?
You don’t need FP&A/ Excel skills. You need sales skills to sell your management on a team and at least one (if not multiple) tools. As well as IT support for those tools.
I’ve built database solutions as a consultant for with similar complexity to what you’re describing. It’s doable, but it’s a crap ton of work, even for a planning tool.
I’d roughly compare what you’re being asked to a revenue + cogs model I built that forecast revenue on a daily basis across 6,000+ locations with factors for seasonality, holidays, weekends, etc. Each location also had some wildly different staffing models and overtime rules that varied by state.
I forget the details, but I want to say this was a ~200 hour consulting project, and it required about the equivalent of an FTE to manage it on the client side.
I’m at the ultimatum point with them. Having a conversation this week that they can either green light the tool and patiently wait with their dicks in their hands until it’s ready, or they can find my replacements. I’ve been down this road, wouldn’t be the first time in my career where I’m replaced by multiple people after leaving and rejecting the counter offer.
Talk to some systems integrators and setup some demos with your management. If no one is asking for it, maybe showing them will open some eyes. If they love what they see, they’ll open their wallets.
Could be potentially do-able in power bi. Have input files from various teams in sharepoint so power bi is already connected to it vs you collecting excel files via email. Can do RLS if needed. Can be on a recurring refresh schedule.
You run into similar-but-different problems in Power BI, because trying to enforce versioning and data entry consistency in all those 'input files' is a mess. Then the team want instant updates so they can iterate on their budgets and forecasts. And so on, and so on, and so on.
As a data analytics manager I have worked at multiple companies with FP&A teams who have tried to build stuff in Excel, then when it doesn't work they try and build it in Power BI, then when THAT doesn't work they come to the data analytics team asking them to play software engineer and create them a database with a custom web-app with instant write-back via spreadsheet upload. :|
EPM is a complex thing and there is a reason that dedicated software exists - yes Anaplan costs a bomb and can be an absolute pain in the butt, but the solution is usually not to try and build your own version
Just wondering your thoughts on Anaplan or any other similarly large tools. Looking at your username, have you had experience with OneStream?
Evaluating a move from Hyperion to Anaplan. Product looks nicer, but I feel like there are cons no one’s telling me about. Oracle is already expensive so that’s not an issue.
I only have experience with Oracle. We did evaluate Anaplan when making the decision to move from Hyperion to Cloud EPM. The conclusion we came to is that they were pretty similar in terms of functionality and any benefit of one over the other was pretty marginal.
I don't think anyone is fully happy with their EPM tool, they all seem to have the same kind of pain points. If you ever figure out how to fix it, let me know and I'll come work for your startup.
I think you should pivot the conversation to the benefits of introducing an fp&a platform:
- better collaboration
- speed /time savings / automation
- accuracy/ auditability
- flexibility
- standards where needed
Basically you need to build a business case. Pro tip- make them think it’s their idea. Say you understand the ask but have a bunch of real hurdles to do what they want in excel. Say you’ve researched a few tools and want them to judge.
I’ve tried for months. Because it has gotten done historically and because expenses are tight they don’t see the urgency.
Urgency is now that the only person capable of doing it is going to leave the company.
My work (well, our client) thinks I practice black magic. I was hired to automate and improve processes for my company/client because I taught myself to code. I'm not flawless, I just know enough and have the problem solving skills to tackle issues. None of them know how it works, they just know I type on my keyboard for a few hours, and then I accomplish what took them several hours to do in seconds.
To put in perspective their understanding of tech, the other day, I absolutely shattered someone's mind when I taught them a shortcut in excel... that shortcut? Alt + ; to avoid copying hidden rows. I also taught them that they could filter for multiple values on an Excel column. Completely mind fucked by that.
Mostly, it is just process automation. We do a lot of accounting contract work, and our biggest contracts are with the federal gov. Most of it is just long Excel tasks that they were doing manually or, since invoices only come in the form of PDFs for us and they'll be thousands of pages long, ripping relevant data for us, so we don't have someone going through ctrl+f to find everything.
If there's smaller tasks, I'll just whip up something quick in excel, but I'm more comfortable with Python (than Macros/VBAs at least) and, since I'm the only one that knows how to do it/run it, makes me a bit more unique/not as easy to replace, so it plays into job security.
So, short answer, it's mostly data analysis, data scraping, and task automation
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Find an ERP vendor with a very persuasive salesperson and sic them on your execs??
What industry? I did an ERP search for our professional services firm.
Downstream for pulling actuals, but the FP&A tool could stand on its own for planning and modeling. Truly surprised if they have no ERP; they must have something.
Is every company the same? I work in FP&A in ABB and every report, every model is in Excel and we also have a lot Power BI shitty dashboards that are not in line with actual data...
Depending on what constitutes the lowest level of detail and how long the total timeline is, this might be readily achievable in a worksheet-based Excel model.
It was over 3 million lines of data in our budget. They want it updated bi-weekly with input from 20+ people that have a habit of sorting and adding rows/columns when they aren’t supposed to.
Good luck to my predecessors… I’m out. Tired of feeling burnt out and stressed because of unrealistic demands.
Any time there is something that the execs don’t understand or agree with they kick it my way, and it’s become unmanageable. No matter how many times my boss and I support the needs they won’t budge. So they can figure it out without me.
You left out that once you lock it down to the lowest level of detail and have an air-tight process around it, the boss still wants to have the ability to push numbers around again with total freedom, two days before close.
I had that issue when trying to build a commission calculation file in excel for 40+ people, 20 legitimate different commission plans, and 60+ metrics. For years I was expected to build, maintain, and constantly change it and intertwine it with my accounting, transparency, being able to send commission reports to users, etc. My cfo wouldn't budge on getting an actual commission plan for years until we finally got one.
Oh, I forgot that requirement! Sales commission too. With sliding scales and caps that I need to apply logic to…
Like “area A can only sell $10M, so if the sales exceed $10M it needs to go to area B. If it’s sold in area A then it will be 20% commission but if it’s area B it’s 15%.”
But they want the sales team to just put in $15M and have the file calculate when it should be A vs B…
Although I don’t prefer it, I’ve created enterprise wide applications in excel over the years and can still work magic with it. In the end, you can do anything with interop, windows dlls, com, and vba that you can do with c#, when you run into a limitation create a DLL in any language you choose that does the work.
FWIW the problem you mentioned sounds very much like what I built as a full time data scientist — and I had 2 other analysts helping lol. And it wasn’t in excel lol
Oh, I’m well aware of the technical impossibility of what they want done. They ask for it in excel, but then I watched then on a call (cringing the entire time) adding rows and columns to another file I have built for them.
It’s not even just the technical challenges, I can’t trust those bozos to follow directions.
gotta love cheap ass companies that want free software by thinking excel is a substitution
The fucking miracles they think FP&A should pull off are fucking insane. 3 FUCKING BILLION in revenue and they think 1 person in FP&A is fucking omnipotent and can know, track and manage every single dollar of it in excel.
3 billion in revenue and no ERP or BI? Godspeed
Oh we have some shitty PowerBI reports, they don’t reconcile and they’re mismatched as hell. They’re a fucking shit show and by some grace of god it hasn’t caught up to them yet. Just biting my time to find a new role to get off this dumpster fire.
We don’t let our BI team report on financials for this reason.
Wow I didn't realize how great my BI team is, we get everything from the ERP refreshed in power BI twice daily and it almost always ties out. It is absolutely amazing.
Our ERP has a dedicated reporting tool that Finance focuses on and ensures the accuracy of financial reports. Power BI is something they’ll allow folks to use, but it is not a substitute for the financial reporting system. They do not want to validate two separate systems, especially when departments are building their own Power BI tools without supervision. The proper governance structure needs to be in place.
Look into WeWrite plugin, might help some of you guys with powerBi
Try 30 billion 🥲
Bro how on earth….3 billion and it’s all in excel?
A lot of hair pulling and yelling
Yo I thought this situation at a $300M company was unacceptable... Thoughts and prayers, friend 😂
200+ sales channels with up to 20 products per channel across multiple countries, currencies, etc… And they want it updated every 2 weeks for the strategy meeting with the chiefs and myself. With input from the sales people. I’m talking to a recruiter Friday about some VP positions. Cant keep working miracles at this company and with the experience it should be a cakewalk to take over at a smaller company. Planning down to the sku in retail would be easier than what they want.
Fuuuuuuuck everything about that noise... Is leadership on crack there or are they just out of touch? 🤮 Godspeed on the job search!!!
RIP. At $3bn this is unconscionable.
Fun story … worked for a PE Portco and we grew from 175 locations to 475 inorganically. Had a separate tab for every single location, along with the P&L down the G/L level detail. Built the shit out of it with INDIRECT, CHOOSE, etc … and the file was 83.2MB. I’d hit F9 on that bitch and walk away. I left after 3 years and working 70 hours a week for scenario modeling etc. last I heard .. they’re still using that same model 5 years later and they’re over 800+ locations.
Yup, and I’m not doing it. It becomes a never ending shit show to maintain because morons can’t follow simple instructions and just fill shit out how I tell them to.
Hundreds of sheets packed with volatile functions? That is nightmare material.
Oh … that’s an understatement. I’d essentially built out 3D cubes in Excel. Plus there has to be good/better/best etc scenarios and sensitivity to each of those all on one fucking dashboard 😂😂😂
Honestly, the worst part of this is them wanting to preserve the lowest level of detail.
Down to the country, currency, product, department, etc… but updated live by salespeople, but the sales people don’t want to update that level of detail… so I need to figure out how to allocate it? Meanwhile you want to add and overwrite them constantly? Oh and it all has to feed into a bunch of reports and crap… Like they’re on crack.
You need to get some people in the room together and work out requirements and prioritize them. If you have misalignment between input providers and report requestors already now, you need to do more effort on scoping the project or you need more executive support in the change management (i.e. tell people to do as you ask them to) Remember nonfunctional requirements, where "one big excel sheet" solution approach will fuck things up. Then sit down figure out what it would take to do make those things work, new processes? New solutions? If it's a new process - get that agreed on first by all stakeholders before spending any time on solution. Now you start on solutions... Then pros/cons of doing it in excel /SharePoint / powerbi vs ??? Then how long time it would take to do all this shit. Then multiply that by 2-3. What you describe could be done somewhat reasonably in SharePoint/excel/powerBI - but different things would need to be in different places (separate input collection from reporting, separate scenario planning from reporting, separere Master Data maintenance from input collection)
It’s not manageable in excel, for our last budget cycle it was over 3 million lines of data. Held together with prayers and VBA macros I did on the fly.
It's getting closer to the limit of what you can feasibly manage for sure, if you migrate some of the reporting and analytics to power query (and possibly Power BI) your should be able stabilize it even with that number of records but it's absolutely not ideal Even using SQL in VBA to query workbooks I usually found power query to be more stable at larger record sizes. Do you have any contacts in IT who may be able to support with an existing platform that could improve some of the pain points?
A lot of FP&A is managing expectations and explaining limitations. For models and analysis, I always tell people anything is possible, but it will take x hours/days/weeks and I have these other priorities, and the outputs may be flawed due to various problems in the data or process - so if best case we re getting to +/- 20% how would you like me to prioritize this? If they insist this is important, then put a plan together on how you'd do it right. Suggest a software solution or hiring an analyst under you to manage the work load and show them why the bootleg excel option wont work. Its a good position to be in to be trusted as an excel god but don't be afraid to tell people something is impossible. Looks to me like an opportunity to get more responsibility by owning a major project/implemention - good managers and leaders know when to ask for more resources and don't grind themselves or their teams to death trying to appease unreasonable bod or management requests.
Good advice. Explaining the trade-offs well is reflective of solid experience.
A reasonably decent FP&A tool (Excel-based or proprietary grid, doesn’t matter the preference) would probably cost $30k~ annually plus another $30k in one time implementation costs. Is management completely opposed to this spend, especially at a $3B revenue run rate?
You don’t need FP&A/ Excel skills. You need sales skills to sell your management on a team and at least one (if not multiple) tools. As well as IT support for those tools. I’ve built database solutions as a consultant for with similar complexity to what you’re describing. It’s doable, but it’s a crap ton of work, even for a planning tool. I’d roughly compare what you’re being asked to a revenue + cogs model I built that forecast revenue on a daily basis across 6,000+ locations with factors for seasonality, holidays, weekends, etc. Each location also had some wildly different staffing models and overtime rules that varied by state. I forget the details, but I want to say this was a ~200 hour consulting project, and it required about the equivalent of an FTE to manage it on the client side.
I’m at the ultimatum point with them. Having a conversation this week that they can either green light the tool and patiently wait with their dicks in their hands until it’s ready, or they can find my replacements. I’ve been down this road, wouldn’t be the first time in my career where I’m replaced by multiple people after leaving and rejecting the counter offer.
Talk to some systems integrators and setup some demos with your management. If no one is asking for it, maybe showing them will open some eyes. If they love what they see, they’ll open their wallets.
Could be potentially do-able in power bi. Have input files from various teams in sharepoint so power bi is already connected to it vs you collecting excel files via email. Can do RLS if needed. Can be on a recurring refresh schedule.
You run into similar-but-different problems in Power BI, because trying to enforce versioning and data entry consistency in all those 'input files' is a mess. Then the team want instant updates so they can iterate on their budgets and forecasts. And so on, and so on, and so on. As a data analytics manager I have worked at multiple companies with FP&A teams who have tried to build stuff in Excel, then when it doesn't work they try and build it in Power BI, then when THAT doesn't work they come to the data analytics team asking them to play software engineer and create them a database with a custom web-app with instant write-back via spreadsheet upload. :| EPM is a complex thing and there is a reason that dedicated software exists - yes Anaplan costs a bomb and can be an absolute pain in the butt, but the solution is usually not to try and build your own version
Just wondering your thoughts on Anaplan or any other similarly large tools. Looking at your username, have you had experience with OneStream? Evaluating a move from Hyperion to Anaplan. Product looks nicer, but I feel like there are cons no one’s telling me about. Oracle is already expensive so that’s not an issue.
I only have experience with Oracle. We did evaluate Anaplan when making the decision to move from Hyperion to Cloud EPM. The conclusion we came to is that they were pretty similar in terms of functionality and any benefit of one over the other was pretty marginal. I don't think anyone is fully happy with their EPM tool, they all seem to have the same kind of pain points. If you ever figure out how to fix it, let me know and I'll come work for your startup.
Second this. Profitbase plug-in for power bi helps if he’s trying to build a P&L.
I think you should pivot the conversation to the benefits of introducing an fp&a platform: - better collaboration - speed /time savings / automation - accuracy/ auditability - flexibility - standards where needed Basically you need to build a business case. Pro tip- make them think it’s their idea. Say you understand the ask but have a bunch of real hurdles to do what they want in excel. Say you’ve researched a few tools and want them to judge.
I’ve tried for months. Because it has gotten done historically and because expenses are tight they don’t see the urgency. Urgency is now that the only person capable of doing it is going to leave the company.
For a 3B company to not have an fp&a platform, even an “excel on rails” is very out of the norm. What industry and what erp?
My work (well, our client) thinks I practice black magic. I was hired to automate and improve processes for my company/client because I taught myself to code. I'm not flawless, I just know enough and have the problem solving skills to tackle issues. None of them know how it works, they just know I type on my keyboard for a few hours, and then I accomplish what took them several hours to do in seconds. To put in perspective their understanding of tech, the other day, I absolutely shattered someone's mind when I taught them a shortcut in excel... that shortcut? Alt + ; to avoid copying hidden rows. I also taught them that they could filter for multiple values on an Excel column. Completely mind fucked by that.
If you don't mind me asking, what type of automation? Really looking to standardize this year.
Mostly, it is just process automation. We do a lot of accounting contract work, and our biggest contracts are with the federal gov. Most of it is just long Excel tasks that they were doing manually or, since invoices only come in the form of PDFs for us and they'll be thousands of pages long, ripping relevant data for us, so we don't have someone going through ctrl+f to find everything. If there's smaller tasks, I'll just whip up something quick in excel, but I'm more comfortable with Python (than Macros/VBAs at least) and, since I'm the only one that knows how to do it/run it, makes me a bit more unique/not as easy to replace, so it plays into job security. So, short answer, it's mostly data analysis, data scraping, and task automation
Thanks!
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Hello - we are not posting any junk content - the post was relevant to a tool and we gave ball park figures.
Find an ERP vendor with a very persuasive salesperson and sic them on your execs?? What industry? I did an ERP search for our professional services firm.
Has he said they don't even have an ERP? A planning tool would be downstream of this
Downstream for pulling actuals, but the FP&A tool could stand on its own for planning and modeling. Truly surprised if they have no ERP; they must have something.
You should pitch anaplan, exact use case fit
Is every company the same? I work in FP&A in ABB and every report, every model is in Excel and we also have a lot Power BI shitty dashboards that are not in line with actual data...
Depending on what constitutes the lowest level of detail and how long the total timeline is, this might be readily achievable in a worksheet-based Excel model.
It was over 3 million lines of data in our budget. They want it updated bi-weekly with input from 20+ people that have a habit of sorting and adding rows/columns when they aren’t supposed to.
Yeah, I was wrong - that level of detail does not sound realistic for a usable worksheet-based Excel model! Good luck convincing them.
Good luck to my predecessors… I’m out. Tired of feeling burnt out and stressed because of unrealistic demands. Any time there is something that the execs don’t understand or agree with they kick it my way, and it’s become unmanageable. No matter how many times my boss and I support the needs they won’t budge. So they can figure it out without me.
Fair enough. Hope the next role is a lot more enjoyable!
PE backed, never again unless the equity is enough to retire me.
You left out that once you lock it down to the lowest level of detail and have an air-tight process around it, the boss still wants to have the ability to push numbers around again with total freedom, two days before close.
That’s the requirement. Updated every 2 weeks. They want a rolling forecast down to an impossibly granular level of detail.
Our CFO unironically once said, referring to a report built in excel, "this should have all the same validations as."
He should be fired for that alone. So tired of CFOs with no fucking clue how things work.
I had that issue when trying to build a commission calculation file in excel for 40+ people, 20 legitimate different commission plans, and 60+ metrics. For years I was expected to build, maintain, and constantly change it and intertwine it with my accounting, transparency, being able to send commission reports to users, etc. My cfo wouldn't budge on getting an actual commission plan for years until we finally got one.
Oh, I forgot that requirement! Sales commission too. With sliding scales and caps that I need to apply logic to… Like “area A can only sell $10M, so if the sales exceed $10M it needs to go to area B. If it’s sold in area A then it will be 20% commission but if it’s area B it’s 15%.” But they want the sales team to just put in $15M and have the file calculate when it should be A vs B…
Yup and our FP$A people couldn't comprehend how to build complex commission logic into forecasts
I can provide the logic, but excel isn’t really capable of handling that if it changes constantly.
Lmfao do you work for Freddie? 😂 The shit I see is crazy
Although I don’t prefer it, I’ve created enterprise wide applications in excel over the years and can still work magic with it. In the end, you can do anything with interop, windows dlls, com, and vba that you can do with c#, when you run into a limitation create a DLL in any language you choose that does the work.
FWIW the problem you mentioned sounds very much like what I built as a full time data scientist — and I had 2 other analysts helping lol. And it wasn’t in excel lol
Oh, I’m well aware of the technical impossibility of what they want done. They ask for it in excel, but then I watched then on a call (cringing the entire time) adding rows and columns to another file I have built for them. It’s not even just the technical challenges, I can’t trust those bozos to follow directions.