001 Where Finance Gets Honest
FP&A Daily is the show for people who live and breathe financial storytelling — not the kind with buzzwords and dashboards, but the kind forged under pressure. Hosted by Sarah Schlott, a fractional CFO, Excel engineer, and system-architect for high-growth companies, this podcast pulls the curtain back on what really happens inside FP&A when the numbers stop adding up and leadership starts asking why.Every episode cuts through the noise that surrounds modern finance — the obsession with accuracy, the worship of precision, the theater of meetings where truth quietly loses to confidence. Sarah takes listeners inside the moments most teams never talk about: the late-night forecast rewrites, the cross-functional chaos, the heroic saves that go unnoticed, and the quiet breakdowns hidden behind perfect slides.Through lived operator experience, not theory, FP&A Daily explores how financial planning & analysis actually works when you leave the textbooks and face the business in motion. You’ll learn how great operators design systems that self-audit, fail loud, and earn trust across leadership. How to turn models into mechanisms that think for themselves. And how to build an FP&A function that doesn’t just predict performance — it shapes it.Sarah brings 18 years of experience designing adaptive forecasting systems, driver-based models, and Excel frameworks for SaaS, manufacturing, and private-equity-backed companies. But this isn’t a show about formulas — it’s about judgment. Each story is grounded in how analysts, finance directors, and CFOs make decisions when data, politics, and uncertainty collide.Expect a mix of storytelling, frameworks, and philosophy:How to rebuild a broken forecast into a system of signal vs. noise.Why “business partnering” is more engineering than empathy.The hidden risks inside clean dashboards.How spreadsheet design reveals leadership culture.Why real analysts stress-test logic, not just numbers.You’ll hear real-world post-mortems from budgets gone sideways, board decks that backfired, and models that taught entire companies what truth actually costs. Sarah’s calm, cinematic narration style turns each episode into a lived case study — one that blends finance, psychology, and system design into lessons you can act on immediately.FP&A Daily challenges the sacred cows of corporate finance: accuracy worship, forecast theater, and the myth that control equals clarity. Instead, it invites operators to think like architects — building systems that stay honest when reality shifts.Whether you’re a CFO, FP&A analyst, controller, founder, or investor, this podcast is your weekly reset button — reminding you that finance isn’t about getting the numbers perfect. It’s about building models and teams that stay truthful when things go off-script.If you’ve ever felt the quiet tension between what your spreadsheet says and what your gut knows — this show is for you.New episodes every week. Real stories. Real systems. Finance, without the filter.