FP&A Today – Details, episodes & analysis

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 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 

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

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

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

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/

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/

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

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

“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/