Episode 79 - How to never be left out of the conversation again in FP&A - with Airbase CFO Aneal Vallurupalli

Show Notes

Airbase , a spend management company currently processes over $5 billion of annual payments on behalf of finance teams. It is a pain point Vallurupalli is all too aware of. "Moving to Airbase solved a challenge I had personally experienced at previous companies were there were 65 or 70 physical [credit]cards in a 300-person company and spend was not controlled. There was no way to forecast when someone was thinking of using a physical card, which was for anything at that time".

CFO Aneal Vallurupalli joins Paul, on Datarails ' podcast FP&A Today , to talk about what CFOs increasingly require from the best-in-class FP&A, based on his experiences in finance and financial planning and analysis at previous companies, stretching from series A companies to public companies.

In this episode:

• The importance of understanding the context and priorities when coming into a new company or role. There's always a rationale for why things were done a certain way before.

• Building credibility and relationships across the organization by understanding pain points, providing value , and conveying industry expertise.

• Moving from growth at all costs in SaaS to revenue growth

• Why he has no single favorite financial metric to analyze a business. The most important metric is often "not financial" and varies by company.

• How AI will displace some repetitive, manual tasks but not logic-based and contextual decision making which is core to finance roles.

• Why having a hunger for knowledge as the most crucial way to win in your FP&A career - with most technical skills being "table stakes"

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