What’s New at CFI | FP&A Tool Selection with Paul Barnhurst

Meeyeon (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of What’s New at CFI, the podcast where we explore the latest tools, ideas, learning opportunities, etc., to help you grow in your finance career. I’m Meeyeon from the CFI Content Team. I’m sure you’re familiar with both my face and voice at this point. And today I’m joined by Paul Barnhurst, aka the FP&A guy that we at CFI have partnered with, and he’s going to introduce our newest course, FP&A Tool Selection.

So if you ever struggled with managing chaotic Excel workbooks, wrangling disconnected reports, or just wondering how to choose the right planning software, this course is for you. Because Paul’s here to walk us through what you can expect and why considering the right tool is more strategic a decision than ever. So welcome, Paul. Yeah, let’s dive right in. This course opens by asking,

Paul Barnhurst (00:49)
Thank you. Excited to be here with you, Meeyeon.

Meeyeon (00:57)
When do I actually need a proper FP&A tool, and what are some signs it might be time to upgrade from my good old Excel?

Paul Barnhurst (01:08)
I mean, I think the biggest signs are when you’re starting to constantly have those broken models because you’re trying to integrate a bunch of different models together, you’re having difficulty collaborating, wrong numbers are getting presented. Those are all signs. When you’re starting to have 50 different versions of a budget, I’ve seen that before, where the versions just get out of control. You have a lot of cost centers.

Or you have so many different data sources that you just can’t manage it in Excel. So those are some of the signs. It tends to be once companies start to scale and add complexity, that at some point it becomes really difficult to manage with just Excel.

Meeyeon (01:49)
And I’d say over the past, you know, past three to five years, lots has changed in general, think work productivity software. And it’s not just to FP&A professionals alone, but the FP&A tool market has, for lack of better words, exploded. So there’s more than 150 tools, maybe more and tons of new entrants in the space. How do you think this course helps our learners make sense of it all?

Paul Barnhurst (02:05)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so the course is structured in a couple of different areas, but making sense of the market. First, what I do is give them some frameworks of how to think about the market so they can narrow it down. Some people just want a spreadsheet on steroids, Excel, or Google Sheets. That narrows down your list, right? They want that scalability, that database where like, I still want to be able to input everything in Excel. There are tools that you can pretty much use Excel for all of it. Others are like, I want a complete replacement. And so

You know, there’s there’s functionality you can look at it by and say different types of tools, whether you’re Excel integration, what I’ll call spreadsheet native or replacement, you know, B.I. a web app. You can look at it that way. You can also look at it, you know, size. There are certain tools, like Anaplan tends to focus on the

upper mid-market and enterprise. SAP Oracle are that bigger enterprise, lot of times multinational companies. If you’re a small company doing $20 million a year, you’re not going to implement an Oracle or SAP solution. And so part of it is understanding different tools, primarily focused on certain sizes. A lot of tools will tell you they serve all, but the reality is, they have a sweet spot. They have an area that they serve best.

You’ll be on that there. There are other areas you can look at. You can look at it by industry. Some tools are specifically industry-focused. Other tools are what I’ll call platform where they go beyond just FP&A. Do they service all of your planning? Can you do supply chain planning? Can you do marketing planning? Can you get your ESG, your consolidation, all those type of things? So knowing that and knowing kind of some of the different options really helps you narrow down.

So that you focus on tools that are a good fit for you. Because you do see this from time to time when someone has no idea and they just hear what’s out there. They’re putting a tool that’s focused on less than $50 million with a tool that’s focused on $500 million plus. And that doesn’t really serve anybody.

Meeyeon (04:19)
And when I was looking through the course, think that one, at least in my opinion, one of the most useful parts of the course is the prep work. So building requirements, writing a solid problem statement, managing the RFP process. Why, in your opinion, as our course author, do you think that groundwork is so critical?

Paul Barnhurst (04:28)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I mean, you first you do your groundwork to try to understand the market, but you have to understand yourself before you can really understand the market. So many people just think I need a new tool. And what happens if you don’t really understand your requirements, you haven’t clearly defined them, know what success looks like, know what your problem statement is. You’re it’s easy to be swayed by the wow factor. Right. Anyone who’s done a bunch of sales demos knows the demo is always designed to show the best,

not necessarily what it’s really going to be. And so it’s easy for them to show you some really cool bells and whistles, the latest algorithm they’re using, the latest AI. I want that. Do you need it? No. But you want it. And so then you end up selecting the tool and you don’t realize, it’s missing all these key requirements I have. So the discipline and structure, and really following doing an RFP and following a rigorous process, is about making sure

you get a tool that’s a good fit for you. And I say a tool, not the right tool, because there’s never a right tool. There are always going to be multiple tools that can meet your requirement. It’s about making sure you select one that can work for you.

Meeyeon (05:54)
And speaking of all these tools, just for fun, if you had to pick one FP&A or general productivity tool that you personally couldn’t live without, and it can’t be Excel, what would it be and why?

Paul Barnhurst (06:08)
Well, since it can’t be Excel, there is no other tool. So if I can go productivity, non-FP&A for my business, right now, I couldn’t live without ClickUp. But that’s not really FP&A-related. That’s a product management type tool. And ChatGPT at the moment.

Meeyeon (06:11)
No!

Paul Barnhurst (06:30)
Or I could do Claude, but I need an LLM.

Meeyeon (06:37)
And what do you mainly use?

Paul Barnhurst (06:40)
So it varies. Claude, I mostly use it for summarizing my transcripts for my podcasts. Creating the post, giving me key insights, key quotes, summaries, all those type of things. I also use it a lot to help with courses. I’ll say, analyze this deck and tell me what I should add to it, what’s missing, your thoughts, and to help build out decks, presentations, coursework.

I’d say ChatGPT I use more for kind of research a lot of times online. I use it to come up with questions, some unique questions for one of my podcast shows and some analysis. Sometimes, you know, analyzing data. I tend to use that more if I need help with an Excel formula. I mean, I have three paid subscriptions. I have Claude, I have a CoPilot, and I have ChatGPT, and I use all three on a weekly basis for sure.

Meeyeon (07:34)
Yeah, and even so related to FP&A tool selection, I love using ChatGPT for kind of being my, I guess, like devil’s advocate, so to speak, where if I have a thesis and I’m pretty sure I’m gonna go with this, I would always ask ChatGPT, basically let’s pretend that we’re in a little bit of a debate here and you have different opinions. Tell me where you think I’m missing, where I might have blind spots, and that’s always been really helpful.

Paul Barnhurst (07:41)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I’d break through that.

And see, you could do that with requirements, with your RFP. You could feed that type of stuff into it and ask it to play that dough. Like how clear are these requirements? What do you think’s missing? What changes would you make? And you may not make changes, but you also may make a lot of changes depending on what it comes back with and how well you’ve done your homework. So it never hurts to do that type of thing.

Meeyeon (08:02)
Exactly.

Thank you, Paul, for dropping in and sharing your insights with us. It’s always great to have you on. If you are listening here and you are evaluating new FP&A software or you just want a smarter process for narrowing down your options, be sure to check out our latest course called FP&A Tool Selection. You’ll see none other than Paul Barnhurst over there.

And that’s it for today. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll catch you next time on another episode of What’s New at CFI.

Paul Barnhurst (08:50)
Thank you for having me on. It was a pleasure chatting with you.