“I am done pretending" - my honest take on finance and FP&A” – Sarah Schlott

31/07/2025 55 min Episodio 170
“I am done pretending" - my honest take on finance and FP&A” – Sarah Schlott

Listen "“I am done pretending" - my honest take on finance and FP&A” – Sarah Schlott"

Episode Synopsis

Sarah Schlott, Senior Director of Finance at Tray, a leading point of sale system in entertainment,  joins Glenn Hopper to tear down the sacred rituals of corporate finance. Rising from billing temp to strategic finance leader, Schlott who has been in corporate finance for 18 years, delivers brutal honesty about what’s broken in FP&A and how to fix it. She challenges everything from annual budgets to variance analysis (“forensic accounting in disguise”) while advocating for a bottoms-up, operator-first approach that actually works.
In this episode:

The power of aggressive curiosity in finance 
My most accurate forecast was also the one that failed 
My views on variance analysis 
Running a $100M forecast in Excel 
Why we shouldn’t treat the annual budget as a “golden idol”
Moving away from a “spreadsheet guilt trip” every month 
From Singer-Songwriter to Finance Leader

Connect with Sarah Schlott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahschlott/

More episodes of the podcast FP&A Today