FP&A Today

The power of flexibility in your FP&A career - Laura Bloom

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Laura Bloom started as as a contracts manager for an air cargo company. In a dramatic switch she moved to accounting, then finance and FP&A at top companies including Dotmatics, Salesforce Comcast, and is now senior finance manager at Icertis, a SaaS platform for AI-powered contract intelligence.

In 2023 she founded Impact FP&A specializing in Go-To-Market (GTM) finance strategy for companies. In this episode she reveals the importance of flexibility in her career and joining the dots in your story: “For example, with contracts management, you wouldn’t think that would translate into finance and accounting. However, as part of that role I was working with sales to build the sales bids for new business. I was also working very closely with accounting to give them revenue expectations for commercial contracts and OPEX expenses for our commercial properties.”

In this episode:

  • My passion for bringing order from chaos in finance
  • Examples from my FP&A including calculating the obsolescence reserve for almost a billion dollars worth of inventory on a biannual basis
  • Building a new model and updating assumptions (transforming the process from 6 months to 60 days and releasing $5m back to the balance sheet)
  • The importance of data minimalism
  • Monte Carlo analysis giving you a wider range of possible outcomes 
  • Tableau as a data visualization tool and digging into commissions
  • Importance of flexibility in a finance and FP&A  
  • Most important FP&A Skill? 
  • The ladder of abstraction
  • The most vital go-to-market finance metrics 

    • Connect with Laura on LinkedIn or email her at [email protected]

    ...more
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