The Tactical Room

The three levers of working capital, the calculation, and the AI workflow that turns a 90-day cash trap into a simulator you can hand the CFO.

Most variance reports stop at ‘we beat budget by 162.’ PVM analysis is how you finish the sentence and turn a number into a decision.

From my Packt workshop: three pre-built Claude Skills and a case dataset that run a monthly close end-to-end. What’s inside, how the skills chain, and how to practice safely.

Claude out of the box is brilliant but generic, like a new hire on day one. The five-step onboarding from my video: project, style, connections, reference files, skills.

Every AI conversation starts from scratch: here’s my chart of accounts, here’s my formats. A Cowork plugin ends that. I show how I build mine, and give you my template.

The spreadsheet lands at 4:50pm. My Cowork sessions run three passes, every time: prove it read the file, decompose and make it sum, narrate with receipts. Here’s the discipline.

“Where do I start with AI?” People don’t lack tools, they lack real examples. I collected 1,000+ implementations from Microsoft, Google, McKinsey and more, and here’s how to use them.

A negative cash conversion cycle means your suppliers finance your growth for free. I break down Amazon’s real 2024 numbers to show how the machine works, and how to measure yours.

Finance and sales argue about one number. The fix isn’t a better forecast, it’s measuring all four funnel stages in dollars. I walk through the value pipeline funnel from my guide.

“Business partnering” stays a buzzword until you can say what it means with Sales versus HR. I walk through the FP&A role map from my guide, one department at a time.

Procurement thinks finance shows up twice: to approve the budget and complain later. I walk the source-to-pay chain from my guide and show the FP&A work hiding in every link.

Somebody always asks “what if growth comes in lower?” A two-way sensitivity table answers before they ask. I walk through the exact table from my mini-lesson, cell by cell.