Have you ever had someone act cold toward you for no apparent reason? When I started my career at Big Four, I found myself in that situation. There was a woman on my team who was one of the most popular people on the floor. All day, I’d hear her cracking jokes with my colleagues. But for whatever reason, when it came to our interactions, she was cold. I tried just about everything to change that. Making jokes, offering to help her with work…anything to get on her good side. Despite all my efforts, none of it ever landed. It was one of the first times I felt truly powerless about something in my career. Nothing I tried seemed to change how she treated me. I’d always believed that if I worked hard enough at something, I could make it happen. And in many areas of my career, that belief has served me well. But here was something that effort couldn’t seem to fix. So how do you know when to keep pushing, and when to accept what you can’t control? Just work harder Henry Ford I’m a big believer that the biggest thing holding us back is often times ourselves, as cheesy as that sounds. Sometimes we get stuck before we’ve even tested what we’re capable of. We don’t dream big enough, or we stop after the first few obstacles. Later in my career, I was having a conversation with my boss, explaining that I wanted the CFO title despite only having a few years of experience. He smiled and told me that to get that title, clients expect to see a few more grey hairs. He wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t accept it. Within a year, I decided to go off on my own. And when I had calls with new clients, I didn’t introduce myself as an analyst. I introduced myself as a CFO. Many passed on the opportunity to work with me, but a few gave me a chance. Within six weeks of going off on my own, I was already making double the salary I’d earned at my old job. I knew I had what it took to step up to the plate. And there was something empowering about pursuing it without waiting for someone else to tell me I was ready. Building the life and career you want takes a belief that your actions can make a difference, and a willingness to keep working when things get difficult. But that same belief can also be dangerous. Because the truth is, working hard can only get you so far. Influence Over Control A lot of the stresses of my day follow the same pattern. Someone doesn’t show up for a meeting we had scheduled. A client resurfaces after being impossible to reach and suddenly needs something done tomorrow. A team member isn’t performing the way I’d hoped. My instinct is to fix it. Find the right words, explain things differently, try a little harder. But I’m realizing that I can’t control those around me. At best, I can influence them. And learning where that influence ends has been a never-ending pursuit. I can communicate expectations, set boundaries, and hold people accountable. I can hold myself to high standards and speak directly without being demeaning. But even when I do all of that, things won’t always go the way I want. And I can’t fix that, no matter how hard I try. Because wihle I can control my own actions, for everything else, I’m learning to accept that I’m not in control. The toughest part of my experience at Big Four wasn’t the work or the long hours. It was the people I worked with. And while I couldn’t make them like me, I could choose to leave and build something else. When I speak with people struggling with their coworkers, I encourage them to consider whether a different environment would help. Being around the wrong people can be mentally draining. But changing your environment won’t change one thing: you’ll still face outcomes you can’t control. Learning to accept that is a lifelong practice. So I’d love to learn from you: how do you accept what you can’t control while working hard to change what you can? Hit reply and let me know. Have a great weekend (though I can’t control whether you will or won’t 😉) Josh (Your CFO Guy) Thanks for reading my article. My goal is to help you grow in your career with proper Finance and Accounting. If we're not already connected on Social media, let's get connected and send me a message to say hi. I promise to respond

Refreshing a model with actuals is one of the most challenging parts of managing a forecast. Why? Because the Chart of Accounts frequently changes, oftentimes because a new account was added… and if you’re not careful when you try to replace your new set of actuals with your existing set, you’ll have a disconnect in your data. Here’s my approach for how to remove the headache…and you only need 2 formulas. Refreshing a model with actuals is one of the most challenging parts of managing a forecast. Why? Because the Chart of Accounts frequently changes, oftentimes because a new account was added… and if you’re not careful when you try to replace your new set of actuals with your existing set, you’ll have a disconnect in your data. Here’s my approach for how to remove the headache…and you only need 2 formulas. and if you really want to take things to the next level, you can transform your data using Power Query. This can be applied both to your forecasts as well as your dashboards (or any excel file). Sometimes you won’t be able to avoid a change in the formatting of your source data. That’s where these next 2 formulas come into play. Let’s start with a scenario where your model is refreshed with July actuals, and now it’s time to update with August actuals. To illustrate, I’m going to copy our old and new data sets to be right next to each other…in reality, they will most likely be on separate tabs or separate workbooks. Our first formula will be extremely simple - we are going to use an = sign to compare whether the old data matches exactly to the right data…like this As you can see, once we get to Commission Expense, we have a discrepancy. The task now is simple - add a new line in your source data, and repeat this until all lines match up identically. when things finally match, you can copy over your new data set and everything will line up. This method is good because it’s really simple and quick to implement - but what if you have 8 new line items out of a chart of accounts that spans 100+ lines long? This would be exhausting. Which is why this next formula is my preferred approach. Instead of comparing each line one by one, we can instantly compare all lines and see which ones are new by utilizing the COUNTIF function. The COUNTIF function works as such: So in this case we are going to count if the value in our new data set is in our original data set. As you can see, all values that were found returned a 1, and all values that were not found returned a 0. We can make this stand out more by attaching a “>0” at the end to return TRUE or FALSE. Rolling forward models used to eat up my entire morning. Every month, same drill. Export the data. Compare spreadsheets side by side. Hunt for new accounts. Check if formulas still work. Fix the ones that broke. Hours gone. Every single month. I remember sitting there thinking, "There has to be a better way." So I built one. That's exactly why we built the Roll Forward feature in Model Wiz. Model Wiz is our SaaS tool that builds financial models and dashboards with just a few clicks. It connects directly to QuickBooks Online, pulls your data, and generates boardroom ready reports instantly. And the Roll Forward feature? One click. The system finds new accounts, places them exactly where they belong, and keeps all your custom formulas intact. No more spreadsheet archaeology. No more rebuilding from scratch. What used to take half a day now takes seconds. Don't trust me? Try it out yourself. ​👉 Get A Free 2 Week Trial What has your experience been with refreshing financial models? Share your experience by replying to this email. Till next time! Josh (Your CFO Guy) Thanks for reading my article. My goal is to help you grow in your career with proper Finance and Accounting. If we're not already connected on Social media, let's get connected and send me a message to say hi. I promise to respond

You've probably heard it's only a matter of time before AI takes your job in finance. But most of what you see online is AI slop. Generic prompts, fake dashboards, and demos that fall apart the second you point them at a real client's numbers. I run a fractional CFO firm and a financial modeling software company, so I get to watch which tools survive contact with an actual board meeting. And some of the tools I've used for years have completely changed. There are tools now that turn a CEO's vision straight into a spreadsheet, tools that make an Excel file look like a designer touched it from a single prompt, and tools that will build you working software in a few minutes. For me, all of this started in a board meeting. With a moment I'm still a little embarrassed about. Alright, so let me start in the room where all of this begins for me. Every quarter I sit in a board meeting with Nicolas, the CEO of Chili Piper, and we go through the entire business. I've been his fractional CFO for about seven years, so I know exactly how much those meetings matter. If you've never sat in front of a board, these are the people who can replace the CEO. Remember Steve Jobs? Here's how those meetings used to go for me. "Sorry, can you repeat the part where you said... the things?" Not my finest work. Now I have Wispr Flow running in the background, and it transcribes the whole meeting, pulls the action items, tells me who said what, and catches the things I missed while I was busy scribbling. The action items pulled automatically after a board meeting And honestly, that changed a lot more than board meetings. When I meet with a client now, I walk away with a full transcript of everything happening in their business, and I can feed that straight into building their financial model. Which turns out to be the whole point. The best context about a business is sitting right there in the conversation, and until recently there was no good way to get it out of the room. Okay, so a few weeks ago I got an alert that ChatGPT can now connect directly to your finances. I tried it, and it found something I was not expecting. I'd been paying for Hulu for almost a year without using it. My wife's reaction, roughly: "why isn't our Hulu working anymore?" The subscription I had been quietly paying for all year Now look, losing a few dollars a month to Hulu is not a CFO crisis. But point that same idea at a company spending millions across hundreds of vendors, and it gets a lot more interesting. Here's the thing though. Your bank only knows so much. It knows who you paid and how much. Your accounting system knows what that payment actually meant. So the connection you really want is into the accounting software. Or your ERP, if you want to sound cool. And the software companies are already there. Intuit is putting AI agents inside QuickBooks that categorize transactions, reconcile accounts, flag unusual activity, and analyze the results. If your accounting system isn't, tools like Claude Cowork can plug into your systems through MCPs, which are basically standard connectors that let AI reach the data sitting inside your company. I show the whole setup running in the video if you want to see it on real numbers. Alright. This is where I've spent most of my career, and it's where AI surprised me the most. The first time it clicked was watching a video from Leila Gharani, a fellow Microsoft MVP I owe a lot of my Excel knowledge to. Until then I thought of AI as something you have a conversation with, not something that takes control of your file. Then in February I got into the beta for Claude for Excel. Halfway through a build, I caught it referencing the wrong column. So I sat back, ready to declare victory over AI. Claude catching its own column reference error mid build Instead I watched it spot the mistake on its own, go back, fix it, and hand me something close to flawless. Hallucination is still the biggest risk when you lean on AI for anything in finance. So watching it check its own work inside my model was a real moment for me. But I'd never blindly trust it. I've watched AI hardcode assumptions, build dashboards that made me nauseous, and completely crash when I asked it to roll a model forward with a new month of actuals. That last one is the one I care about most. Rolling a model forward every month is exactly the repetitive, finance specific work that general AI still can't handle. I run every one of these tests in the video. Now look. Everything up to here was about getting to a number. This part is about the thing that actually gets seen. Most stakeholders still expect slides, and if you're building those by hand you're pretty much in the Stone Age. So I uploaded an Excel file to Claude for PowerPoint, and it built slides on my branding, read the data, and wrote the commentary based on what was happening in the business. But I barely use it anymore, because I found something better. With Claude Design you're not stuck with slides at all. You describe what you want and it builds a working page you can actually click through. A live dashboard your CEO can filter herself. A calculator that runs scenarios. An internal tool that pulls straight from your model. That's software. Not a deck, not a spreadsheet, an actual thing people use. And this is where it got weird for me, because I don't know how to code, and I'm still personally shipping features into our own product. A feature going from a conversation to a working screen Same tool, completely different job. My editor Yurii used to build every animation in my videos by hand, until he told me he'd started having Claude Code make them instead. Which gave me an idea. So I asked him if he could take an Excel file and turn it into a video walking through the insights in my voice, since explaining the numbers is something I do for clients every single month. A few minutes later he sent one back. It's not perfect yet. But think about where this goes. Instead of emailing someone a spreadsheet and asking them to work out what changed, they get a five minute video explaining exactly what happened in their business and why. The full walkthrough is in the video. Now look. I'd never use any of these tools without understanding the fundamentals underneath them. For strategic finance, that starts with knowing how to build a three-statement model, and that's still the first thing I'd learn if I were starting over today. The tools keep changing every few months. That part doesn't. Knowing the fundamentals is one thing, though. Rebuilding the same model from scratch for every new client is another, and that one I did get tired of. So I built Model Wiz. You connect your accounting software directly, or you just upload a P&L and a balance sheet, and it reads the data and builds you a CFO grade financial model inside Excel in as little as two minutes. Then when the month closes, instead of rebuilding anything, you hit roll forward. It pulls in the new actuals, spots any new accounts that showed up, and adds them into the existing file without wiping out the work you already did. You can try it for free at modelwiz.com. Now I'm curious about you. Which of these have you actually tried on real client work, and which one let you down? Hit reply and let me know. I read every single one. Josh (Your CFO Guy) Thanks for reading my article. My goal is to help you grow in your career with proper Finance and Accounting. If we're not already connected on Social media, let's get connected and send me a message to say hi. I promise to respond