The Tactical Room
Practical FP&A, financial modeling, and AI for finance. The thinking behind the numbers.
- What using AI taught me about reading a book
The goal is to create boundaries that allow me to trust enough to go beyond what I already know. Because if AI can only tell us what we already know, that is not intelligence. That is confirmation.
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- What using AI taught me about reading a bookThe goal is to create boundaries that allow me to trust enough to go beyond what I already know. Because if AI can only tell us what we already know, that is not intelligence. That is confirmation.
- The Number That Wins Isn’t Always the Number You Fund
Two capital projects, one budget. NPV picks one winner, IRR picks the other, and the ranking flips at the board’s own hurdle rate. Where the math stops and the judgment starts. - The Cash Conversion Cycle, Rebuilt for the AI Era
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. - Price, Volume, Mix: how to explain why revenue actually moved
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. - Three Claude Skills that run a monthly close: my workshop toolkit
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. - I onboarded Claude like a new hire. Five things, and it works like a coworker.
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. - Build your finance plugin: stop re-explaining your chart of accounts to AI
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. - My three-pass rule for analyzing financial data with Claude Cowork
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. - 1,000+ real AI use cases, and how to actually browse them
“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. - Amazon gets paid before it pays its suppliers. Here’s the machine behind it.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.
- Sales FP&A: measure the funnel in money and the forecast argument ends
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. - What FP&A actually does: a map of the job, department by department
“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 has six steps. Finance belongs in every one of them.
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. - The two-way table that shows what your plan can surviveSomebody 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.
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