Finance needs faster answers, not just better reports
For most of my career in FP&A, the work started after the numbers were closed. We would gather data, reconcile it, explain it, package it and then deliver it to the business. The problem was that by the time the answer was ready, the business had often already moved on to the next question.
That changed for me when finance became more deeply connected to our data platform.
I have been using Snowflake for finance for eight years. One of the clearest signals that we were building a different kind of FP&A organization came early: the fourth member of my team was a data scientist. That was intentional. I believed finance needed to move beyond reporting what happened and become a true operating partner to the business. To do that, finance data could not stay trapped inside spreadsheets, static decks and month-end processes. It had to be activated inside the workflows where decisions were actually being made.
That shift has been transformational for my career. Once finance data became easier to access, model and operationalize, my team spent less time acting as a reporting function and more time helping business leaders make decisions. The automation we could achieve also helped us scale that support efficiently.
