Navigating the Limitations of Excel in FP&A

Sarah Schlott, Senior Director of Finance at Tray, a leading point of sale system in entertainment,  joins Glenn Hopper to tear down the sacred rituals of corporate finance. Rising from billing temp to strategic finance leader, Schlott who has been in corporate finance for 18 years, delivers brutal honesty about what’s broken in FP&A and how to fix it. She challenges everything from annual budgets to variance analysis (“forensic accounting in disguise”) while advocating for a bottoms-up, operator-first approach that actually works.

In this episode:

• The power of aggressive curiosity in finance 
• My most accurate forecast was also the one that failed 
• My views on variance analysis 
• Running a $100M forecast in Excel 
• Why we shouldn’t treat the annual budget as a “golden idol”
• Moving away from a “spreadsheet guilt trip” every month 
• From Singer-Songwriter to Finance Leader

Connect with Sarah Schlott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahschlott/