Let’s not kid here: Working in January can feel a little like rowing without an oar. It’s cold, the holiday bills come due, and the kids always have some kind of bug. To help pull you out of your winter blahs, CFO Brew has gathered a big, warm bowl of useful information on making an impact in FP&A, topping up your Excel skills, and identifying common budgeting process mistakes.
Our usual disclaimer to the wise: You should always look for additional resources and expertise when doing complicated finance work because it can be very difficult to accurately sum up sophisticated concepts.
With that said, take a look at these useful finance cheat sheets CFO Brew found on LinkedIn this month.
- Ian Main’s “5 ways to have a big impact on FP&A in 2024.” If you’re an FP&A pro who made New Year’s resolutions to juice your career, Main offers advice on how to raise your profile. Main, a FP&A consultant based in Stockholm, Sweden, lays out five specific ways to increase your workplace visibility including collaborating across teams, sharing your knowledge, and scaling up scenario planning.
Main also provides action items, such as sitting in with other teams to demonstrate your value, or using numbers to provide context to key drivers, to boost your status. - Philip Handke’s “The top 10 Excel functions to bring your skills into 2024.” While generative AI is all the rage for finance pros now, here’s some real talk: Excel is still the backbone of finance and accounting. But Excel’s age and dominance could mean that you are using it the same way you were 20 years ago.
Handke, an Excel and Power BI trainer based in Arizona, offers up 10 Excel functions that “will bring your skill set into the new year!” Handke includes a text explanation of each function as well as a slide deck that lays out what each is “great for” and when to use them. For example, he describes the Take function as being great for “focusing attention on a specific subset of data” and says to use it “when you need to analyze the ‘Top X’ or ‘Bottom X’ values.” The cheat sheet also features explanations and uses of the Let, Filter, Textsplit, Sort, Unique, Index, Textafter, Sequence, and XLookup functions. - Ehab Sobhy’s “Disclosing the top ten budgeting process mistakes.” Budgeting is a key part of a business’s strategy, especially as the macroeconomic environment becomes more volatile. Ehab Sobhy, a finance executive based in Cairo, Egypt, identifies 10 of the most common budgeting process errors, the negative impact of those mistakes, and potential remedies.
For example, he cites a lack of cross-functional collaboration, which leads to “disconnected financial plans” that disrupt strategic decision-making. As a solution, he recommends “[establishing] cross-functional budgeting teams” to improve communication and increase input. Sobhy also explores mistakes like inadequate contingency planning, unrealistic revenue projections, overlooking non-financial metrics, and others. This cheat sheet is available for viewing on LinkedIn, and you can pay to download a PDF of it on an external website.