Why Financial Models Break (Before the Numbers Do) Most forecasts don’t fail because your CAC was off by 2%. They fail because something nobody tracked—like late enablement, internal misalignment, or approval drag—slowed the business without ever touching the model. Traditional FP&A focuses on cost, margin, and bookings velocity. But SaaS companies don’t move in straight […]
Finance doesn’t just report numbers anymore—we model behavior. And yet, most SaaS FP&A teams still rely on static forecasts that ignore how long decisions actually take. Forecasts assume motion. But workflows define speed. Here’s the problem: our financial plans depend on workflows we don’t track. We plan headcount without modeling ramp time. We forecast bookings […]
Deferred revenue is not a new concept. Most SaaS CFOs can recite ASC 606 in their sleep. But what we rarely see—even at $100M+ ARR—is a proper deferred revenue forecasting model. Recognition schedules? Everywhere. Forward-looking visibility? Nowhere. This matters because deferred revenue isn’t just an accounting exercise—it’s a leading indicator of renewal behavior, cash leverage, […]
Most SaaS companies don’t run out of cash because the product failed. They run out of cash because they hired like maniacs. You see it after every funding round. One day it’s 14 people in a Slack thread. Three months later, it’s 43 full-timers, 7 open reqs, and a mysterious Enablement team nobody understands—but they’re […]
Every SaaS CFO knows the drill: You lock the budget. You run the numbers. You present the deck. And three weeks later, the CEO pivots the go-to-market strategy—and your model collapses in public. This isn’t a tooling issue. It’s a strategy issue. Specifically, five budgeting habits that look like discipline but behave like chaos. If […]
Every SaaS company has a forecast.But very few have a SaaS forecasting strategy. There’s a difference. A real forecast guides hiring, unlocks budget, and tells your board what’s coming before the spreadsheet breaks. A fake one is just math-washed optimism—numbers built to match the plan, not the pipeline. So how do you know which one […]
Finance says the model works.Sales says it doesn’t reflect reality.Both are right—and that’s the problem. In 2025, SaaS companies don’t fail because they missed their number.They fail because no one could agree what the number even was. We’ve seen it over and over: the FP&A team builds a solid top-down model……and the GTM team ignores […]
Why reverse-engineering ARR targets leads to burnout, bad forecasts, and budget chaos There’s a moment—usually around late-stage Seed or early Series A—when a founder, hopped up on ambition and caffeine, turns to their new finance lead and says: “We need to hit $10M next year. Can you show me what that looks like?” That sentence […]
(And What to Do Instead) There are only two people who think in years: venture capitalists and kindergarteners. Everyone else is lying. Founders say “next year” like it’s a destination. A place they’ll visit after funding season. A cleaner, more hydrated version of their current company where sales are up, churn is down, and somehow […]
Most finance teams catch burn after it spikes.But the death spiral starts earlier—and quieter. It starts when the hiring plan gets approved without modeling productivity.When you build headcount before you build yield.When you staff for speed, not signal. In 2025, over-hiring is no longer a margin issue.It’s a forecasting failure with board-level consequences. This post […]