Fire Drills, Fractional Work, and AI Reality Check: Carl Seidman

A forecast can be useful for running a business and still lack the evidence needed to defend it. What happens when accounting and FP&A report different revenue numbers for the same month, and the disagreement comes down to how a contract is interpreted? In this episode of FP&A Today, Sarah Schlott welcomes Norm Osumi to explore the judgment calls that sit between financial reporting, business performance and forward-looking forecasts. Through a SaaS revenue-recognition example, Norm examines why bookings, billings and recognized revenue are not interchangeable, and how implementation fees and sales commissions complicate the picture. The conversation then turns to EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA, where excluding recurring expenses or making aggressive add-backs can change the story a business tells about its performance. The central question is what happens when an FP&A forecast becomes evidence for an auditor, lender or investor. Norm discusses an auditor requesting five years of purchase orders to substantiate future revenue and explains why assumptions around growth, customer activity and the sales pipeline need to be reasonable and documented. For smaller finance teams, the lesson is not to build more elaborate models. It is to understand which numbers matter, what supports them and when to bring accounting into the conversation. Key Moments

The books were closed. The audits were supported. Then the CEO asked two simple questions: which products make the most money, and which ones don’t? Nobody could answer. Purity Kibaki was the consultant hired to implement the system that was supposed to answer them. Purity, CPA(K), leads group reporting, consolidation and finance systems at Hatch Africa. She previously founded Zirconn Black Group. She has been the accountant closing the books, the FP&A analyst who inherited them, and the consultant building the system underneath. She and Sarah explore what happens when finance systems are built around transactions and order-to-cash, but not around the questions FP&A eventually has to answer. The result is familiar to many FP&A teams. Accounting closes successfully, but finance still can’t answer basic questions about product profitability, regional performance, campaigns, utilization or operational drivers without pulling data together by hand. Purity and Sarah discuss why “heroic Excel workarounds” can hide weaknesses in the underlying process. They also cover why FP&A data rarely gets the same scrutiny as accounting data, and why buying another planning tool doesn’t fix a broken source. The conversation also gets practical. Purity explains which dimensions and tags need to be captured at the point of entry. She argues that system requirements should come from the people doing the work, not only senior leaders, and that finance professionals are better placed to become systems-aware than technologists are to become finance-aware. Her core message is simple: fix the source, and let everything downstream flow from it.

The most expensive finance hire can be the one that looks senior enough to feel safe but solves the wrong problem. Tom Hunter of Story Recruitment joins FP&A Today to explain why the first finance hire at a startup is often not a CFO. Story Recruitment focuses on first-CFO and first-finance-hire searches for Australian tech, fintech and deeptech startups, and Tom also hosts The CFO Track Podcast. His starting point is simple: before choosing a title, define the financial problem the business actually needs someone to solve. That often means building the basics first. Tom describes financial controls, governance and reliable reporting as the foundation that FP&A and strategy have to sit on. He also shares an example of a founder who included GST in ARR, overstating revenue and contributing to a chain of due-diligence concerns that ultimately cost the company its lead investor. For growing businesses, the finance function itself becomes a signal of how organized and decision-ready the company really is. The back half of the conversation looks at how the finance skill set is changing. As AI and better tooling reduce the moat around some technical work, communication, commercial judgment, project management and the ability to influence better decisions become more valuable. Tom argues that finance professionals should not see themselves as ticket takers or back-office support. The strongest finance people operate as commercial enablers who understand the problem, explain the numbers and help move the business forward. Key Moments

Building FP&A from scratch isn't primarily a spreadsheet problem. It's a people, process, and alignment problem.Katelyn Stienen, Director of FP&A at Good Day Farms and a top-16 finisher at the Excel World Championship, joins FP&A Today to share what happens when you walk into a five-year-old business with more than 170 legal entities, around 10,000 budget lines, no dedicated planning system, and department heads who have never worked with a structured P&L. After experiencing established finance processes at much older organizations, Katelyn is now building the FP&A function from the ground up.One of her biggest lessons was that introducing FP&A is not as simple as sending out a budget template. Katelyn had to establish what a budget actually means, connect operational budgets with the numbers being communicated to leadership and investors, and create a common financial playbook across the business. She explains why bottom-up planning creates better accountability, why finance should approach variance conversations as investigators rather than enforcers, and how seemingly small misses across individual entities can become material when consolidated.The conversation also explores planning inside the highly regulated cannabis industry, when a growing company is ready for dedicated FP&A software, and how better systems can shift finance away from simply collecting numbers and toward understanding what is driving them. For Katelyn, the real job of FP&A is turning the stories coming from the business into numbers - and being able to explain why reality ultimately differed from the forecast.Key Moments● Building FP&A from zero starts with financial understanding, not templates. Before introducing a detailed budget, finance needs to understand how department leaders currently think about spending, forecasting, and accountability.● The business needs one financial playbook. Operational teams cannot manage against one version of the numbers while leadership and investors work from another. FP&A has to connect the two. ● Bottom-up budgeting creates better conversations. Greater line-item detail gives finance something concrete to challenge, explain, and manage with department leaders rather than simply holding them to a top-down target.● FP&A should investigate, not assign blame. Katelyn shares her Director of Finance's description of finance as "reporters" trying to understand what happened rather than punish teams for missing a number. ● Small variances can become significant at scale. An expense miss that looked insignificant at individual stores became a roughly $50,000 variance once Katelyn consolidated it across the organization. ● Complex businesses require scenario thinking. Different regulations, tax treatments, markets, and operating models across states mean FP&A has to combine financial modeling with knowledge from legal, operational, and commercial teams.● Technology should move FP&A from gathering numbers to asking better questions. With stronger reporting and consolidation in place, finance can spend less time finding the numbers and more time understanding what is driving them.● Forecast accuracy is not the whole story. Katelyn would rather miss a forecast and be able to explain exactly why than hit the number without understanding what drove the result.Timestamps09:51 - What established companies taught Katelyn about what good finance processes look like16:44 - "I'm starting at absolute zero": building a budgeting process where none existed19:13 - Getting operations and leadership onto the same financial playbook24:25 - Why FP&A should be "reporters," not a function that assigns blame29:56 - Managing reporting and planning complexity across more than 170 entities39:37 - Turning business stories and market knowledge into numbers and forecasts42:09 - When is a company ready for dedicated FP&A planning software?53:09 - Would you rather be lucky or good?

The best FP&A professionals don't just explain the numbers. They understand the business well enough to influence it.Gauri Tambe, Head of Finance & Accounting at Genezen, joins FP&A Today to explore what finance looks like inside the world of cell and gene therapy. Scientific uncertainty, capital-intensive programs, customer funding risk, strict quality requirements, and constantly changing timelines mean that simply consolidating the numbers is not enough. For Gauri, understanding the day-to-day operations of the business is fundamental to being an effective finance leader.Gauri estimates that only 40% of her role is running and reporting the numbers, while the other 60% is influence: aligning sales with operational capacity, helping R&D and supply chain make better decisions, building contractual protections around uncertain programs, and keeping teams focused on the same business outcomes. She also shares how Genezen uses probability-weighted pipelines, weekly flash reporting, and a 13-week cash plan to manage uncertainty.The broader lesson for FP&A is that you have to become a strong business professional before becoming an effective finance professional. As AI is increasingly used for reporting and analysis, understanding operations, challenging assumptions, influencing people, and knowing what is happening behind the numbers is becoming more valuable.Key Moments● FP&A has to understand how the business actually operates. In a high-risk environment, knowing the numbers without understanding operations makes it difficult to identify the real risks and opportunities.● Influence can matter more than reporting. Gauri describes her role as roughly 40% running the numbers and 60% influencing R&D, operations, sales, and supply chain.● Finance connects the organization. When sales forecasts demand that operations cannot deliver, finance is uniquely positioned to bring teams together and reconcile ambition with capacity.● Forecasting uncertainty needs more than one forecast. Pipeline probabilities, contractual protections, bad-debt reserves, weekly flash reporting, and cash planning all work together.● Contracts are part of financial planning. Upfront payments, cancellation provisions, and stage gates can protect capacity and capital when customer programs change unexpectedly.● Cash can tell a different story from the P&L. Finance teams should challenge a strong-looking P&L by asking whether the same strength is actually showing up in the bank.● How Genezen operates as a finance function with five people in accounting and a team of two in FP&A.● AI raises the expectations placed on finance professionals. If reporting and basic analysis can increasingly be automated, junior finance professionals need to develop operational understanding, critical thinking, and cross-functional experience earlier in their careers.Timestamps08:18 - Why finance leaders need to understand operations, not just the numbers11:13 - Gauri's 40% numbers, 60% influence philosophy19:00 - When strategic misalignment needs a meeting, not an email28:03 - Using contracts and cancellation clauses to protect against revenue risk31:27 - How Genezen uses 50-90% probabilities to forecast its opportunity pipeline41:35 - Weekly flash reporting and managing a 13-week cash outlook50:41 - Why a good finance professional must first be a good business professional56:30 - Stop relying on your P&L and look at your cash flow statementEarn CPE CreditIf you would like to earn CPE credit for listening to the show, visit https://earmarkcpe.com/fpa.Download the app, take a short quiz, and get your CPE certificate.Further Reading/ListeningGauri Tambe & the Genezen Leadership Teamhttps://www.genezen.com/about-us/meet-the-team/Genezen - Cell & Gene Therapy CDMOhttps://www.genezen.com/Pitt Hopkins Research Foundationhttps://pitthopkins.org/Sarah discusses her daughter's Pitt Hopkins diagnosis in the episode and the role foun