Have You Ever Wondered What FP&A Looked Like Before Excel?

I asked William Etzine VP of Finance at Trump Hotels and finance leader with nearly 50 years in hospitality, and his answer was a whole history of the job. Budgets were built on 13-column paper with a pencil and an eraser, so when the president changed an assumption you erased it by hand and re-added every row, and once the PC arrived, hitting F9 to recalculate took a full hour, long enough to run over lunch. Then Excel made all of that faster, though it did nothing for the trust, because formula errors crept in until, in his words

William said: "Top management started losing confidence in Excel as a budgeting and forecasting tool."

Listening to him, you can almost count the generations.

• Generation one was paper.
• Generation two was Excel.
• Generation three was the FP&A platform, governed and controlled, with one version of the truth.
• And generation four is the one we are living now, that same platform with AI layered on top.

Each one was faster and cleaner than the last, and yet across a portfolio the numbers still quietly stop meaning the same thing from one property to the next. The tools keep changing. The trust gap does not.

Read William's full story

We got into generation four live on June 18. See the session.