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 FP&A, his experiences of financial planning and analysis at previous companies, stretching from investment banking to series A companies and 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"
 
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.

Read the full transcript: https://www.datarails.com/how-to-never-be-left-out-of-the-conversation-again-in-fpa-with-airbase-cfo-aneal-vallurupalli/
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/J0keFw4WPjM