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

Have you ever made a mistake at work that still makes you cringe? Early in my career, I was helping a client through a fundraise. I had just submitted their financial model to their investors and eagerly awaited their feedback. My heart sank as I read their response to the CEO. “Chad, do you really think it’s a good idea to spend your entire marketing budget next month?” An error in my Excel file had caused their projected marketing spend to shoot up to millions of dollars in the first month of projections. Would you have caught this mistake? I was so embarrassed. How could I have let something like that slip? At the same time, a financial model has thousands of data points. How was I supposed to catch every detail? I kept thinking about how my boss would have reviewed that same model. He would have known where to look, which numbers to question, and what safeguards to put in place. We could look at the exact same spreadsheet, yet he could see things I couldn’t. And it made me wonder: what do experts see that beginners miss? An Expert Sees the World Differently Around that same time, I was having dinner with some friends, and my roommate had prepared homemade hummus. Everyone said it tasted better than most store-bought versions. They were dying to know her secret. After one bite, I asked: “You peeled the chickpeas, didn’t you?” The secret to smooth hummus that only experts know about I had experimented with hummus for years. Peeling the chickpeas was the detail that finally gave mine the smooth, creamy texture I’d been chasing. My friends could taste the difference. I could recognize what caused it. We were eating the same dish, but experiencing it differently. The same thing happens everywhere. A musician hears a song and recognizes the chord progression, the arrangement, the choices that make it work. A writer watches a TV show and recognizes how a scene builds tension, plants a clue, or sets up the eventual payoff. The more you understand the craft, the more you can see. That’s one of the greatest rewards of mastery: you get to experience familiar things with a depth you never had before. And I’ve seen this play out in Finance & Accounting in a dozen different ways. Building Expertise in Strategic Finance Expertise comes from repeated practice: building, reviewing, making mistakes, and learning what to look for next time. If I were starting over in Strategic Finance today, here’s where I would focus: Financial Statement Connections Learn how the P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow statement connect. From closing the books to building a 3-statement model, understanding those relationships helps you see how a decision affects the entire business. You begin to recognize when the numbers aren’t telling a consistent story. Error Checks Sadly, that modeling mistake wouldn’t be my last. But my errors became far less frequent once I learned to build guardrails into my files. Whenever you transfer data from one place to another, add a check to confirm the totals reconcile. Build checks for relationships that should hold, too: the balance sheet balances, and ending cash matches across your statements. These checks help you spot problems before someone else does. The Error Check table: Confirming everything in your spreadsheet ties out Start at the Macro Level, Then Go Micro A spreadsheet can contain thousands of cells. Reviewing each one individually can overwhelm even a capable professional. Start with the big picture: revenue, margins, expenses, and cash. Does something look off? Drill into that area and trace what’s driving it. Experience helps you recognize where to focus your attention. Start at the macro level, and then drill into the details where needed Understand How the Past Blends Into the Future This is the review that could have saved us that client. Compare the last three months of actuals with the first three months of projections. Look for sudden changes in spending, growth, margins, or cash. Some changes are justified by seasonality or planned business decisions. Others reveal a mistake. Either way, you should be able to explain what changes and why. Can you spot the issue with these numbers? An entire marketing budget appearing in one month? That’s a story I would know to question today. You’ll still make mistakes. The important part is turning each one into a better check, a better question, or a better habit. Over time, you’ll look at the same spreadsheet and see things you once would have missed. This year, everything I’ve known about FP&A has been flipped on its head. I used to spend hours in Excel building formulas. Now, I’ve watched AI agents generate entire financial models in minutes from a simple prompt. But that raises a different question: The numbers are there. Can I trust them? In my own tests, each tool gave me a reason to pause: Claude hardcoded subtotals. Copilot changed opening cash in a historical month. ChatGPT used a single assumptions column where I needed inputs for multiple periods. Years ago, I might have missed those details. Today, they jump out at me. Could those models have made it past an investor? Maybe. But I’ve already learned how expensive an overlooked detail can be. That’s what experience has given me: the ability to look at something impressive and understand where it still needs work. So now let me ask you: What’s one area you consider yourself an expert in? What do you notice that others miss? Hit reply and share your story. I’d love to read it. Have a great weekend… and see what you notice. 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

Summarized financial statements are a huge value add in any sort of financial reporting…and they are actually really easy to prepare. If you have the ​Model Wiz plugin​, you can instantly generate dashboards like these right in your Excel file with a few clicks of a button. Today, I'll walk you through the importance of preparing summarized financial statements and provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to create them on your own. Your financial statements tell you about the financial health of your company and are one of the most common ways in which financial data is communicated. But there are a few problems. 👎 Financial statements can be too long to fit on slides. Your Profit & Loss will oftentimes take up dozens and dozens of rows. This makes it very challenging to put in a slide deck and present it to stakeholders 👎 It’s easy to get overwhelmed with data When you review a report with so many lines, it isn’t immediately apparent where there are anomalies that require investigation. 👎 It’s difficult to identify patterns When you don’t have your financial statements summarized, it becomes difficult to identify trends in cost groupings or departments When you summarize your financial statements, all of these problems disappear. So how do you do it? It’s actually really easy… Start by exporting your Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet from your accounting software. You can also export your statement of cash flows, or instead generate your own via the indirect method. Add a new column after your account list called “Summary Grouping”, and start mapping out each account to the summary grouping that you want it to show under. Be careful not to classify any accounts with the word "Total" in them as that will cause double-counting. Now that you know what summary groupings you will use on your summarized financials, it’s time to outline your dashboard. Here you can also invest in a pretty design with a relevant header and color scheme. Now is where the magic takes place. The SUMIFS formula allows you to SUM values IF they meet 1 or more criteria. So you’ll SUM the values in each month if the summary groupings column equals the line you are in. Now that you have your data pulled in by month, it’s time to aggregate things on an annual and quarterly basis to give you greater context into what’s happening. I like to prepare summarized dashboards as a first step in analyzing my data and then drilling down into any accounts that seem off…this saves me time and helps me identify issues much more quickly than going line by line. If you want to learn more about this topic, check out this ​video​. Plus it makes for a great dashboard to report on! What has your experience been with summarizing financials? 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

Last year, my wife and I moved to the suburbs, and with more space came the chance to chase a dream: building a professional video studio. If you’ve ever lived in New York City, you know how impossible this would’ve been. Tiny apartments, shared walls, and no room for piles of wood and soundproofing. Out here, I finally had the space. Trying to turn my old NYC apartment into a recording studio A couple of months later, I brought in an expert. He flew across the country to meet me, and we had a mountain of lumber delivered right to our townhouse. Everything was set. Then came the text from my landlord: “Hi Josh, I see a lot of wood outside the house. Are you planning to do any construction? Please note that no construction is allowed in the basement due to special zoning laws around flooding.” Enter panic mode. This project was a five-figure investment. The contractor was already here. Work was supposed to start in a few hours. And suddenly, the entire plan needed to change, fast. It reminded me of a truth I’ve seen over and over in finance and accounting: Amateurs might have a Plan B. Experts have a Plan Z. They’ve seen every curveball before, and they know how to adapt when the first plan falls apart. That’s where this week’s story begins. The Confidence Gap I’ll never forget one quarterly review early in my career. I always dreaded those meetings, not because I feared bad feedback, but because the feedback usually felt generic and unhelpful. This time was different. “I don’t see any confidence in the way you carry yourself here,” my manager told me. “I asked you a question and you said, ‘I think it’s this… maybe that… don’t quote me on it.’” She was absolutely right. I loved what I was doing, and I was learning quickly, but I was afraid to attach confidence to anything. Because confidence has consequences. In finance and accounting, confidence means putting your name on the line. If you’re a controller, it’s closing the books and standing behind the numbers even when auditors ask tough questions. If you’re a tax advisor, it’s signing off knowing you didn’t miss a key requirement. If you’re preparing materials for a board, it’s sending them out without needing to follow up later with a correction. Clients don’t just hire us for accuracy. They hire us for assurance. And assurance requires confidence. But confidence isn’t something that you can just go out and acquire. It’s something that needs to be earned. The 20/80 Rule I once had a strain in my chest muscle that wouldn’t go away, so I went to see a doctor. “Let’s get you an MRI,” he suggested. “That should give us the answer.” He looked young, probably early in his career, but he seemed sharp, and I wanted to trust him. So I got the MRI, waited weeks for the results, and came back for the follow-up. “The MRI didn’t show anything,” he said. “I’m out of ideas.” You’re out of ideas? I thought. After months of pain and hours of appointments, this doctor had nothing left. It wasn’t until later that I discovered the real problem wasn’t my chest at all. It was my back. And I couldn’t help but think: if I’d seen a doctor with 20 more years of experience, he might have recognized it right away. That’s the thing about expertise: it takes time. The classic 80/20 rule says 80% of results come from 20% of effort. Learn the fundamentals of accounting, and you’re already 80% of the way to becoming a controller. But the other 20%, the ability to see patterns, anticipate problems, and adapt instantly, takes 80% of your career to build. You can’t hack that part. You earn it through repetition, mistakes, and experience. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know the drill: test, iterate, hypothesize, learn. It’s not a burden; it’s how you build a bulletproof career that no one can take from you. I stood there sweating as my landlord confronted the contractor. “Nothing is allowed to be hung on the walls. Do you understand me?” Without missing a beat, the contractor replied: “No problem.” Then he turned to me: “What if we build the walls six inches off the existing wall? I can attach them with screws and a few slight modifications to the design.” I was amazed. In seconds, he had reimagined the entire plan. And just like that, the studio was back on. And if you’re wondering what it looks like, here's how it turned out. Get ready. Even more is coming on my road to becoming an expert. Have a great weekend. Till next time, Josh 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

Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. But cash is reality. And after working with over 100 fast-growing companies in my career, I've seen firsthand what happens when a company doesn't track their cash flows properly. I've seen this story happen many times. A company is not tracking their cash flows. And they don't realize that all of a sudden they can't make payroll. What actually kills a company? It's not a lack of sales. It's not high expenses. It's running out of cash. So today I'm going to fix that. Five must-have cashflows templates for any business. And by the end, you'll know exactly which one to reach for, and when. This is the foundation. All you need to produce it is an income statement and a balance sheet. It breaks into three sections: operating activities, investing activities, and financing activities. You start with net income, add back depreciation and amortization, then account for the changes in your current assets and liabilities. When it's connected to a three-statement model, every change you make flows through automatically. But while this template is helpful, it's also a lot of information. Most people don't really know how to read this, let alone the fact that they may not want all this detail. And it's also pretty boring and ugly. Which brings us to template two. Same data. Much easier to consume. This groups everything into clean summary buckets. What I like about this is it becomes really easy to showcase the information on a quarterly basis, an annual basis, or even a custom basis using year to date or trailing 12 months. And if you want to present this to a stakeholder, you just hide the columns you don't need. Now you have an easy snapshot you can share with anyone. Now we're making it visual. This takes everything from the summarized statement and turns it into charts and clean visuals. Change the year and all the information will automatically update. It's just pulling everything directly from your drivers. No additional heavy lifting. The biggest thing I'm after is insights. And there's one insight where if you're not on top of it, you could literally destroy your entire business. This one is my favorite. And the most important one in the whole list. You want to understand at all times: when are you projected to run out of cash? This dashboard answers that question directly. Here's a real example. You can see the company is projected to run out of cash in May 2026. I change the capital injection from $1 million to $1.5 million. I go back to the dashboard. Now we've bought until July. Two months. That's the difference between making payroll and not. And this is why it's so important to have these templates connected to a three-statement model. As you make changes, as you roll forward each and every single month, the dashboards update automatically without any additional heavy lifting. When you need to zoom all the way in, this is the template you reach for. Most models track cash monthly. But it's really common to track cash flows on a weekly basis. There's a special term for this: 13 week cash flows. This runs on the direct method, which is a lot more intuitive to read. You can see exactly how much you're projecting to collect in cash from customers. How much you're expected to pay for payroll. How much you're drawing down for debt. How much you're repaying. You can't get this level of granularity using the indirect method. There are two scenarios where this template is essential. The first is if the company is in a serious cash crunch. You're going to want to measure every single expenditure to make sure they don't run out of cash. The second is if the company gets so big that they have their own treasury function, focused on optimizing cash, taking advantage of the right interest rates, and managing debt instruments. To me, being a strong CFO means that you understand when to use each and every single one of these templates and how to explain what's actually happening in the business. That's the job. Now, setting all of this up from scratch, especially for a new client with a custom chart of accounts, is pretty tedious and manual. That's exactly why I built ​Model Wiz​. It's an Excel add-in that connects directly to your QuickBooks Online or Xero account and builds all of this with just one click. Which of these five are you missing right now? Hit reply and let me know. 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

How do you know when to trust your gut? For the last seven and a half years, I’ve been building a budgeting and forecasting tool called Model Wiz. I’ve put hundreds of thousands of dollars into it, along with thousands of hours of work. I even had a heated debate with our CTO about which feature to release next minutes before my wedding began (seriously). The tool helped me scale my firm to seven figures. So when I released it to the public about 18 months ago, I believed I’d found something other people would want just as badly. But right now, we’re roughly breaking even, and growth feels painfully slow. That disconnect is frustrating. How can I believe in something this strongly, have seen it work in my own firm, and still be struggling to get it into other people’s hands? Recently, a coach gave me an assignment I wish I’d started sooner: have 200 conversations with prospective customers. Don’t pitch. Just ask how they solve the problem today, and listen. I’m about halfway through. Some conversations have strengthened my conviction. Others have made me question things I was sure I knew. What your gut can’t tell you Most big decisions begin with a feeling in your gut. That feeling can give you the conviction to leave a job, start a business, or pursue an idea long before you have proof it will work. But your gut is less reliable when the decision depends on other people. Will customers pay for this? Will you enjoy the career you’re considering? Will a new way of working actually help your team? Those are questions you can investigate. My experience building financial models gave me a strong reason to create Model Wiz. It couldn’t tell me whether other people experienced the problem the same way, or wanted the solution I’d imagined. That’s where data helps. It can reveal the assumptions you’ve stopped noticing. Without it, you can spend years getting better at solving a problem that matters far more to you than it does to anyone else. But data has limits, too. One person’s opinion isn’t a trend, and even a hundred conversations won’t make the decision for you. People can tell you what frustrates them today; they can’t always imagine a better way of doing things. So how do you strike that balance? Your 200 conversations You can use this approach whenever your instincts matter, but there’s something you don’t yet know. A career move, a new business, or a change in how you work can all benefit from testing your assumptions with people who have firsthand experience. Here’s how I’d approach those conversations: Step 1: Identify who has the answer to your question Your time and energy are limited. Start with people who have lived through the decision and can tell you what it was actually like. When I considered leaving my Big Four job to start a company, I asked myself: who is living the financial life I hope to have one day? That helped me identify people whose experience I wanted to learn from. Step 2: Ask to learn, not to pitch People have an aversion to being sold to. Tell someone what you’re trying to figure out, why you value their experience, and ask for 20 minutes. With Model Wiz, I’m asking prospective customers to help me understand how they work today. I’m not asking them to sit through a pitch. Step 3: Ask questions that can change your mind This has been one of the hardest parts for me. Early on, I’d ask, “Would you find it valuable if we built ___?” I thought I was gathering feedback, but I was inviting people to agree with an idea I’d already formed. Now I ask what they’re doing today, where they struggle, and what they’ve tried. If I’m asking about a career decision, I want to know what surprised someone after they made it, including what they wish they’d understood beforehand. You don’t need exactly 200 conversations. You need enough honest ones to see where your assumptions hold up, where they don’t, and what you’re willing to do with what you’ve learned. So what have my conversations revealed so far? Three things have surprised me: Some people are using AI in sophisticated ways that reduce their need for additional software. People want the ease of editing a forecast outside Excel, alongside the transparency and traceability of an Excel file. Many don’t want to learn a whole new system. They want to give the one they already use superpowers. I don’t have all the answers yet. But I’m finding out which assumptions deserve another look while I still have time to do something about them. So maybe you can help me…If you’re involved in budgeting or forecasting, how are you doing it today, and what’s the most frustrating part? Hit reply and tell me. I’m listening. Have a great weekend. I recommend enjoying it, but you should probably get a second opinion 😜 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

Here's what my reporting used to look like. An ugly profit and loss. Rows of accounts and nothing else. So I built three dashboards on top of it. A KPI view, a comparison against prior period and prior year, and a summary view that lets me flip between months, quarters, and years. They looked great. And then next month rolled around… New export, new accounts that weren't there in July, and me relinking every dashboard while my coffee went cold next to me. One to two hours. Every single month. I'll admit… I did that for way longer than I should have. Then I learned Power Query. Now I point Excel at the new month's data, hit one button, and all three dashboards update for August. Alright, so here's why linking dashboards is such a pain in the first place. It has nothing to do with your formulas. It's the shape of your data. A normal profit and loss runs two directions at once. Accounts down the side, dates across the top, values sitting in the middle. Easy to read. Miserable to work with. Power Query fixes that, and the tool itself is way simpler than people think. You're just teaching Excel the cleanup steps once, so every month you hit refresh and it runs them again. So I take that wide, messy layout and pivot it. The same profit and loss before and after Power Query reshapes it One clean table, top to bottom. A single row for every account and every month. And once your data looks like that, everything after it gets easy. Now you need to tell those dashboards which line rolls into which number. Nobody wants to scroll through forty line items. They want a handful of numbers that actually matter. So subscription revenue, product revenue, and services revenue all roll up into one line called revenue. The obvious move is to add a mapping column right onto your profit and loss. Don't. Because next month a new account shows up, and you're back digging through your source data trying to remember where it belongs. So I keep the mapping in its own little table instead, and let Power Query connect the two with a merge. A merge is really just an XLOOKUP. Match on the account name, pull the grouping across. But it never touches your source data. A separate mapping table linked to the P&L instead of edited into it Change something in that mapping table, hit refresh, and it flows through everywhere. That's the piece that lets you drop in a fresh export every month and have it just work. With the data clean and mapped, the dashboards are almost boring to build. A SUMIFS on the summary grouping and the date range, copied across. But here's the part I really want you to steal. At the bottom of every dashboard, I build an error check. It compares the dashboard back to the source, and it screams the second the two don't match. So when I load August and something doesn't tie, I'm not annoyed. I'm relieved. Because that flag is Power Query telling me a new account showed up. The error check lighting up the moment a new account appears And one more query lists exactly which ones. Last month it was implementation income and bonuses. I map those two, hit refresh, and every dashboard updates at once. That whole afternoon I used to lose? Now it's one button. Now, I'll be honest with you. Setting this up the first time is real work. The queries, the mapping table, the error checks. But you build it once… and every month after is a single click. Coffee still hot. That's a big part of why I built Model Wiz, where all of this comes already wired in. Either way, the setup above is yours to keep. But enough about my close. What's the one thing in yours that still eats hours it shouldn't? Is it the relinking? The mapping? 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

A wise man told me if you want to build a good life, learn from your mistakes. If you want to build an amazing life, learn from someone else's mistakes. I’ve been in the workforce now for just about 14 years, and there are many moments I’m still kicking myself for. Today, I want to share them with you in the hopes that they will help you avoid the same path I went down. The Mistakes That Cost Me Immediately 1. Sending Nearly 100 Tax Forms With the Wrong Social Security Numbers What happened: A member of my team imported data into a spreadsheet without realizing it was offset by one row. Nearly 100 people received a tax form containing someone else’s Social Security number. The lesson: You cannot review every detail, but you are responsible for building controls that catch high-risk mistakes before they reach a customer. 2. Sending Out a Board Deck With a $3 Million Error What happened: A client had just raised a large round of capital and was preparing for its first board meeting. I spent weeks helping build a credible plan to present. The problem? A formula error caused $3 million of expenses to be excluded from the cash flow forecast. The lesson: Every spreadsheet needs error checks. Whenever data moves from point A to point B, build a control confirming that it transferred completely and accurately. 3. Turning a Client Departure Into a Fight What happened: Early in my journey as a business owner, I felt a knot in my stomach whenever a client announced they were leaving. It almost felt like they had let us down. During one departure, I got into a heated argument over the offboarding process and refused to cooperate unless the client paid more. In the process, I destroyed what had been a strong relationship for more than three years. The lesson: A few extra dollars are rarely worth destroying a valuable relationship. Set reasonable boundaries, but make every effort to part on good terms, even when you believe the other side is being unfair. The Mistakes that Took Me Years to Understand 4. Not Firing an Underperforming Employee Sooner What happened: Early in my journey as a business owner, I hired someone who showed tremendous potential. Unfortunately, he was unreliable, and “Sorry, I forgot” became a frequent excuse. I kept giving him more chances because I cared about our people and believed in what he could become. The lesson: An underperforming employee can become the biggest drain on everyone around them. Invest in your people, provide clear feedback, and give them a fair opportunity to improve. But when it becomes clear that someone is not working out, take action quickly. 5. Charging What We Could Instead of What We Should What happened: When our firm moved from hourly billing to value-based pricing, we sometimes won contracts at higher prices simply because I believed the client was willing to pay. Eventually, some clients compared our pricing with competitors and felt they had been taken advantage of. When money became tight, many left for lower-priced alternatives. The lesson: Profit matters, but pricing still needs to reflect the value you consistently provide. When the gap between price and perceived value becomes too large, it can damage your reputation and push even your best customers away. 6. Leaving the Follow-Up to the Client What happened: After moving away from hourly billing, we felt less pressure to “babysit” clients for requested data. We sent the initial information requests but did not always follow up persistently. As a result, some clients paid for services they were not receiving. They eventually grew frustrated that the work was not getting done, even though we were waiting on them. The lesson: If you need something from a client to do your job, obtaining it is part of the job. Follow up until you have what you need. With hourly billing, silence can stall the work and cost you revenue. With retainers, it can leave clients feeling cheated for paying for a service they never received. 7. Neglecting My Network What happened: When I started my firm, I spoke with as many people as I could and formed some incredible partnerships. As the firm grew and my attention became fragmented, I stopped developing new relationships and investing in the ones I already had. Both my business and my quality of life suffered. The lesson: Your network is one of your most powerful assets, and it takes years to build. Keep relationships warm, show up for people, and never stop connecting with like-minded individuals. 8. Wearing Too Many Hats What happened: I have always prided myself on being a jack of all trades. That versatility helped me start an accounting firm, a media company, and a software company. What I failed to appreciate was the cost of dividing my attention among them. The lesson: Meaningful success requires sustained focus. Doing many things can feel safer because you are diversifying your bets, but each additional commitment takes energy away from your ability to do one thing exceptionally well. 9. Optimizing My Calendar for Time Instead of Energy What happened: I used to treat my calendar as an open schedule. Between 9:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., and sometimes later, people could book meetings anywhere, and I might work on almost anything. It took me years to recognize how much this fragmentation was reducing both my output and my energy. The lesson: Energy comes in waves. There are periods when you can perform at your best and others when you need to recover. I now organize my calendar into 90-minute blocks, using each one for either deep work or three consecutive 30-minute meetings. I perform at a higher level and genuinely enjoy my days more. 10. Waiting Too Long to Enjoy Life What happened: I spent years believing I needed to work until I achieved complete financial freedom. Only then, I thought, could I spend each day doing what I truly enjoyed. The lesson: There is value in sacrificing today to create more freedom tomorrow, but you should not postpone your entire life in the process. Draw a box around the things you enjoy, protect time for them now, and continue working toward greater control over your future. So what are the common themes? → Double-check your work, and build controls that prevent the same mistake from happening twice. → Prioritize relationships, recognizing that a strong network requires continuous investment. → Choose focus over fragmentation. → Don’t compromise your well-being for the promise of “someday.” Revisiting these mistakes makes me cringe, but it also makes me grateful. At 37, I have already learned some crucial lessons that I hope to carry with me for the rest of my career. I’m sure you have made a few mistakes I can learn from, too. So tell me…what is one of the biggest mistakes you have made in your career, and what did it teach you? Hit reply and let me know. I read every response. Have a great weekend. And whatever mistakes you make, make sure they’re new ones 😜. 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

How different would your life be if you had an expert guiding you every time you felt lost? Last week, I had one of those moments. I was wondering whether it was time to get a haircut. I know…not exactly life-changing. But lately, I’ve been trying a different hairstyle, and I wasn’t sure how to approach it. For most people, that would mean going to a barber, explaining what they want, and letting the professional handle it. But I’ve been cutting my own hair for the last 10 years. So instead of breaking my streak, I did what I now do whenever I’m stuck. I asked ChatGPT. Providing a full 360-degree angle of my hair for ChatGPT Providing a full 360-degree angle of my hair for ChatGPT I sent over a few pictures, explained what I was trying to do, and asked: Would this hairstyle actually work on me? Was my game plan solid? What was I missing? I had never used ChatGPT like this, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. But lo and behold…the answer came back. I got diagrams, detailed recommendations, and an explanation of things I never fully understood after a decade of cutting my own hair: how the crown works, where to thin, and how the fade should blend. ChatGPT’s suggested new look for me - what do you think? ChatGPT’s suggested new look for me - what do you think? For the first time, it felt like I had an expert barber walking me through the cut. Everyone talks about using AI at work. Emails. Spreadsheets. Research. Slide decks. But I think the bigger shift is more personal. For nearly free, we now have expert guidance in our back pocket for almost anything we’re trying to figure out. And I’m not sure most people have fully processed what that means yet. My AI-Powered Life The haircut was just the beginning. Over the past two years, ChatGPT has quietly found its way into almost every part of my life. When I’m cooking, I rarely start with a recipe anymore. I describe what I’m trying to make, send pictures as I go, and ask what to adjust. When I had a cyst, a rash, or random heartburn, my first instinct wasn’t to Google symptoms or wait for my doctor to respond. It was to take a picture, describe what I was feeling, and ask ChatGPT what it thought I should do next. When I wanted to get better at Spanish, I stopped relying on Google Translate and started practicing for 15 minutes a day with ChatGPT. Y ahora, siento que puedo hablar español mejor que antes. It has become the place where nearly every major (and in many instances, minor) decision starts. My wife jokes that I use ChatGPT too much, and honestly…she might be right. Some days, one of my favorite things to do is sit on the couch, talk into my phone about whatever is on my mind, and work through it with ChatGPT. And while I don’t just blindly trust everything it says, it has become an amazing thought partner in almost everything I do. Remember when the movie Her came out in 2013, and everyone thought the idea of an AI companion was crazy? 🤔 Remember when the movie Her came out in 2013, and everyone thought the idea of an AI companion was crazy? 🤔 And the craziest part isn’t that this is what reality looks like now. It’s thinking back to what reality looked like just a few years ago. The End of the Waiting Room If you zoom out, it’s incredible to see how much our access to knowledge has changed. Around 1450, the printing press allowed ideas to be copied and shared with the masses. In 1876, the telephone made it possible to speak with people who were once out of reach. Then in the 90s, the internet gave us access to almost any piece of information we could search for. But AI started to explode in 2022, it felt different. The evolution of access to knowledge The evolution of access to knowledge For the first time, we don’t just have access to information. We can have a conversation with it. We can ask follow-up questions. Explain our exact situation. Push back. Add more context. Ask why. Explore a different angle. And keep going until we feel ready to make a better decision. For centuries, expert advice depended on who you knew, what you could afford, and whether someone had time to help. Today, personalized guidance is available to almost anyone with an internet connection and the right prompt. The new bottleneck isn’t access to expertise. It’s your ability to explain your situation clearly enough to an LLM with the right context. So, I started snipping away. Every few minutes, I stopped, took another picture, and sent it to ChatGPT for feedback. It told me where to keep fading, which areas still needed to be thinned out, and where to stop. By the end, it told me I had done a great job. But the process already felt strangely outdated. Why did I need to keep stopping and uploading pictures? Why couldn’t ChatGPT simply watch through a live video feed and guide me in real time through an earpiece? My prediction is that’s exactly where we’re headed. It probably won’t be long before wearable devices can see what we see, hear what we hear, remember the context around us, and offer advice right when we need it. That may sound invasive, and there will absolutely be real questions around privacy, dependence, and when we should turn it off. But used thoughtfully, imagine what becomes possible. Fewer arguments that spiral out of control because each person has an AI helping them respond with more maturity. Fewer lonely people stuck in their own heads without anyone to talk to. More people getting better guidance on their health, relationships, money, career, and decisions before small problems become big ones. And yes, sometimes it may simply be a voice in your ear reminding you that cutting another inch off your hair is probably not a good idea 😅. Do you find this AI-powered future exciting, terrifying, or somewhere in between? Share your thoughts here. I read every response. Wishing you a weekend with fewer bad decisions and better prompts 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

Forecasting the Balance Sheet is one of the toughest parts to get right in a forecast…and it’s also one of the most valuable. It may seem daunting, but there’s actually not much to getting this right once you understand a few key aspects of a Balance Sheet. ​ Grab a cup of coffee, cuz we’re going to have some fun! What We're Going to Talk About Why You Need to Forecast the Balance Sheet 90% of the time when I see a forecast from a new client, it’s missing a Balance Sheet. Somehow…the idea that the Balance Sheet is not as important as the Profit & Loss has spread, and few people understand just how powerful including a Balance Sheet in a forecast can be. Here are a few reasons why you NEED to include a Balance Sheet in your forecast: 1. Most companies report on the ACCRUAL basis ​As a refresher, the Accrual basis of accounting reports income when it is EARNED, and expenses when they are INCURRED. ​ This differs from the Cash basis, which reports income when cash is received, and expenses when payments are made. ​ ​For more details on Cash vs Accrual, see this video here. 2. It’s Really Simple to Forecast Cash When You Have Both a Profit & Loss and a Balance Sheet Creating a dynamic cash flow statement is really easy - you just need to take the values from your Profit & Loss, and Balance Sheet. ​ This to me may be the most important reason why you need to include your Balance Sheet…it helps you forecast cash with very minimal effort…and cash is king 👑. ​ For more information on how to create a cash flow with your P&L and Balance Sheet, see this video here. 3. The Balance Sheet Provides CONTEXT This is the number 1 reason why I feel the Balance Sheet reigns supreme over all other statements - it’s the only one that gives you CONTEXT. ​ The context on what was invested into the company, and how the profits compare against those amounts invested (called Return on Equity). ​ For more information on how to read a Balance Sheet, see this video here. OK, now that we know why your forecast needs to include a Balance Sheet, let’s jump into how you can forecast your Balance Sheet using the BASE framework. The BASE Framework Recall a key difference with the Balance Sheet vs the Profit & Loss…​ its values get shown CUMULATIVELY.​ The Profit & Loss and Statement of Cash Flows showcase information on an INCREMENTAL basis…each period doesn’t depend on the last and is shown independently of one another. The Balance Sheet on the other hand showcases its balances each period with the following structure: Every Balance Sheet account follows this format and is what we are going to use in order to create our Balance Sheet forecast. Here are some of the most common accounts you’ll be forecasting: Latest Month of Actuals One last important note on forecasting the Balance Sheet.​ Recall from the sections above that each Balance Sheet account starts with analyzing the balance at the beginning of the period…​ Well, that’s just a fancy way of saying the balance at the end of the last period.​ But it’s not as simple as just referring to the ending balance on your forecast from the last month of actuals…you’ll want to pull in the ACTUAL value from your Balance Sheet as of the latest month of actuals.​ See…the best forecasts include both historicals & projections… this gives you the ability to analyze where the business has BEEN, as well as where the business is GOING. This consolidates your financial reporting and makes it a breeze to identify trends while calling out unusual spikes between your actuals and your projections. So to forecast a Balance Sheet account’s value in the first period of projections, you’ll need to first collect the ending value as of your latest month of actuals.​ I like to set a named range in my forecast for the date in which I have the latest month of actuals set - this makes it really easy to refer to in formulas, which I have everywhere on my Balance Sheet projections: This means that if you have a forecast that showcases actuals through April 2024, and projections starting in May 2024…your Beginning Balance for all Balance Sheet accounts needs to match the ending Balance as of April 2024.​ If you don’t do this, your ending balance will cause a huge swing in comparison to the true starting point, causing your cash flows to incorrectly calculate. What is a Waterfall Table? Recall from earlier where we discussed the structure for forecasting each Balance Sheet account using the BASE framework: What this really means is we need 2 inputs to get to our ending balance… ADDITIONS...and SUBTRACTIONS. Let’s start with Additions, which is the easiest of two to update. Additions can represent anything that makes your balance sheet account balance go down. Here are examples of the way each account we spoke about earlier goes up: To forecast additions to these accounts, there isn’t so much to it. Or maybe there is…but it’s certainly simpler than forecasting the subtractions (which we’ll talk about soon). Here are some ways I’ve forecasted these line items in the past: The general idea with these accounts is that there’s a lot more flexibility with how you forecast the additions to these accounts when compared to forecasting what makes these accounts go down. See… as we spoke about earlier, the Balance Sheet shows all of its values CUMULATIVELY… Which means that any account balance that goes up should have a set schedule for how that balance will eventually go DOWN…or as we call it, get amortized. Introducing the Waterfall Table OK, so we’re ready to discuss the logic behind forecasting our first Balance Sheet account - Deferred Revenue. Let’s assume we are a SaaS platform that sells quarterly licenses to customers. The formula for Deferred Revenue is: Beginning Balance Additions - Gross Sales Subtractions - Amounts recognized in Revenue Ending Balance To get to gross sales (additions), this can come from anywhere…the key is to have a robust Revenue Forecast that showcases the amount of sales you expect to generate each period. But to get revenue (subtractions)? That one is a bit trickier. Here, we’ll need to take the amount that we generated in sales and divide things by 3. We then need to layer in each cohort’s recognizable revenue amount, and sum up the values from those cohorts like such: To do this, we’ll need to create what’s known as a Waterfall table. A waterfall table allows you to take an amount (like sales), and AMORTIZE that amount over a set of periods (like revenue). Here are the key requirements for a waterfall How to Set Up a Deferred Revenue Waterfall Table Let’s revisit each of the steps mentioned above in the context of Deferred Revenue: 1. Show your gross amounts going across horizontally (in this case, sales)​ This is going to be the amount that we want to amortize. In this case, it’ll be the gross sales amount. Because we are recording things with accrual accounting, we now need to showcase the actual revenue amount separately. 2. Create a vertical sequence of dates that matches your horizontal set of dates​ To amortize each booking, we need to understand what cohort we are in. For example, we know that we did $90,000 in sales in January - that will be the vertical date we show. The horizontal dates will showcase the revenue to recognize in each period from that cohort. There are a few ways to create vertical dates quickly. The quickest way is to use the transpose function, which is a spill function that will convert your horizontal range to a vertical range as such: 3. Pull in Gross Amounts Using a Lookup Function ​Now we need to get our gross amounts for each cohort. To do that, you’ll use a lookup function. Here’s an example using XLOOKUP: 4. Populate assumptions for how your gross amount will be recognized Now we need to set up the rules for how we will amortize revenue for each gross sales amount. In this case, we’re selling quarterly deals, so we’ll amortize over 3 months. Add a new section for your assumptions, and enter a 3 as such: Let’s take things to the next level by changing “3” to “3 Months”. Because are are going to refer to this cell, we can’t actually add text after the 3 or we’ll get a scary #VALUE! error. Instead, we will keep the cell’s identity as 3, but utilize custom formatting to add the text “ Months” after whatever number we add. This will change the way our cell appears while maintaining its identity as the number 3. To do this, hit CTRL 1 to open the format cells dialogue box, click Custom, and type in your value as such: Notice how the value changes, but Months still get added afterward. 5. Populate a Formula to Amortize the Gross Amount OK, now comes the formula to amortize revenue. And the logic is pretty simple… We have 2 conditions: If our horizontal month is greater than or equal to our vertical month… And if we are less than X amount of periods into the future it’s less than dividing our gross amount by the (where X is our amortization period)… THEN divide our gross sales by our amortization period. Otherwise, return 0. For this, we can use the AND function, and the EOMONTH function, as such: Now all that’s left is to sum up the values from each cohort: When you’re done, your Deferred Revenue balance should be summarized as such: Understand Accrual Accounting: Know the difference between accrual and cash accounting. Include Both Statements: Use both the P&L and Balance Sheet for a complete financial picture. Context Matters: Use the Balance Sheet to provide context for your financial data. Use Latest Actuals: Always start with the most recent actual data for accurate forecasts. The BASE Framework: how you forecast all items on the Balance Sheet, which leaves additions & subtractions as the only items to update. Deferred Revenue: Additions are taken by adding the gross sales amount, and subtractions are taken by amortizing gross sales into revenue. To Amortize Revenue: create a waterfall table that showcases dates going across vertically, and pull in each gross sale amount. Add an assumption for your amortization period and use custom formatting to add a relevant text to your value. Populate your formula to amortize revenue based off of the amortization assumption By following these steps, you can create a reliable and insightful Balance Sheet forecast. 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