On a Mission to Help 1M Finance pros Master FP&A skills | Author of All About FP&A | Building FP&A Professionals Institute

▶️ Follow me for new and interesting content on Finance and FP&A ▶️

Hi, I’m Asif, a Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) professional and an entrepreneur from heart.

I have 12+ years of experience in Financial Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting, Audit and Tax. I have worked with organizations like EY, Citi and Pfizer.

Professionally my interests lie in Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) and in my current role with Coursera, I'm responsible for Planning. Budgeting and Forecasting for India and APAC. 

In my previous FP&A roles at Citi, Pfizer and Great Learning I partnered with  finance and business leaders on various projects.

Before Citi, I worked with EY as an Audit Executive. I was responsible for planning, executing and concluding audits for listed companies.

This unique blend of experiences in FP&A and Audit, has allowed me to develop an holistic understanding of how businesses function.

Core expertise :
Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A)
Budgeting
Financial Planning
Financial Forecasting
People Management
Management Reporting
Finance Business Partnering
Auditing
Taxation
Content Creation

To have a quick chat you can call me on +91 8097379663 or email me at asif.masani@gmail.com

Asif Masani

Day 2/30 of 🎥 30-Day Claude + Excel Challenge
Day 2 - Setting Up Claude Inside Excel

Today we move from theory to setup.
If you want to use Claude with Excel, this is the step that unlocks everything.

Here’s what we cover:
• How to create your Claude account
• Why you may need Claude Pro ($20/month) for the Excel add-in
• How to install the Claude for Excel add-in and connect it to excel.

⚠️ Important: If you’re using a company laptop, check your IT policy before installing any AI tool. I strongly suggest starting on your personal device.

Once installed, Claude appears inside Excel as a chat panel.
That’s where the magic begins.

Tomorrow, we start asking Claude real Excel questions  formulas, analysis, explanations.
If you’re part of the challenge, comment Day 2 done once you’ve installed it.

Day 3 drops tomorrow.
Follow me for the entire journey.

Also I’ve opened 100 more for the Using Claude using Excel for FP&A Course
Join here : https://lnkd.in/dMS3g_pb
If you miss the top 100, comment Claude below and I’ll get you added.
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I'm Asif Masani author of All About FP&A and From Accounting to FP&A
Program Director CGFPA® at FP&A Professionals Institute
On a mission to help 1M Finance Professionals master FP&A Skills.
Click my Name + Follow + 🔔

Helping 1M Finance pros Master FP&A skills | FP&A Jobs | Director at FP&A Professionals Institute | Author of All About FP&A, From Accounting to FP&A and Data storytelling Playbook | Udemy Instructor

I always wanted to become a paella cook, but my path led me to spend 20 years in finance and tech - eventually becoming a fintech entrepreneur and a frustrated paella aficionado.

I did my time in Investment Banking across NYC, Sao Paulo, Zurich, and London. But I redeemed myself by pivoting to tech, where I launched four fintech products back-to-back.

Today, I’m the co-founder and CEO of Abacum, the leading FP&A automation platform helping finance teams in the mid-market drive efficient growth and deliver business impact.

My partner in crime, Jorge Lluch, and I built the product we wished we had in our previous finance roles. Solving a problem that used to make us bleed in the head has been a dream come true.

We’re on a mission to make finance teams the heroes of their organizations.

“Cool, but what exactly does Abacum do?”

• Drives efficient growth through more accurate revenue forecasts, advanced scenario modeling, headcount planning, and OPEX control.
• Provides real-time access to all your operational and financial KPIs in one place, automating Board decks, monthly performance reviews, and reforecasting reports.
• Boosts budget owner accountability with structured collaborative workflows and actionable to-dos.

On a personal note, family always comes first. I live in New York with my amazing wife and three high-energy kids. For me, success is when my kids use my back as a walking mat - keeps them busy and gets the knots out.

Quick facts: I practice Vipassana meditation. Fan of Stoicism, especially Epictetus. I journal daily. Vegetarian.

I enjoy martial arts, surfing, and eating embarrassing amounts of chocolate. Originally from Spain, I’ve lived in India, Brazil, Switzerland, the US, and the UK, and I miss them all.

If anything from above interests you, follow along for more content. While I mostly talk shop, you might also catch the occasional post about my quest for the perfect paella.

Julio Martínez

SAVE THE DATE: April 9th, NYC 🗽
Abacum "What-If" Summit 🔥

We in Finance are being asked the same question from every direction: “What’s your AI strategy?”

Here at Abacum we are privileged to talk to the sharpest Finance leaders every day and one thing is clear: 

Everyone is experimenting but few have a clarity of what great looks like and what strong AI adoption in finance actually looks like.

The program is intentionally built for Finance by Finance with sessions including:

→ A moderated fireside chat with OpenAI on how to actually scale AI in your org
→ A live boardroom simulation where we navigate the trade-offs of AI-driven decisions
→ An interactive audience-voted debate on the future of finance

👉 Spots are limited and we are almost at capacity today. 
Request an invite here: https://lnkd.in/gCffk7ST

cc David Bhattacharyya, CFA Wei Loke Matt Ghering Sruthi Lanka Vanna Krantz Richard Harem, CFA Evan Pincus Rakib Azad Brian Weisberg Chris Brubaker Fraser Hopper Tania Secor CJ Gustafson Christian Wattig Meghan Curtin McKenna 🔥

Co-founder & CEO at Abacum | AI-native FP&A that Drives Performance

One of the underrated parts of being a founder is having other founders you can speak honestly with.

When Ali Hussain and I get together, we skip the surface-level updates and go straight into the nitty gritty. What's working but most importantly, what isn't.

The hiring decisions that keep you up. The growth bets you’re rethinking. The things that look confident from the outside but feel messy inside.

There’s a different depth to the conversation with founders (especially ones in a similar stage and industry). You don’t have to explain the pressure, it’s already understood.

From our first conversation, I could tell we share the same drive and it’s reflected in the way we’re building Tabs and Abacum .

I always leave those mornings feeling lighter, sharper, and eager to plan the next one.

The future is bigger.

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One of my favorite Slack channels at Abacum is #kudos.

It’s where wins get called out in public.

Big ones. Small ones. Quiet moments that could easily go unnoticed.

Recently, someone dropped a note that might sound dull on the surface:
a new member logged in.

But then you read the name: Eduardo Saverin.

What I loved wasn’t the name itself (even though, yes, that was pretty great).

It was that someone chose to make the moment a shared one.

Wins don’t need to be big to matter. Credit doesn’t need to come from the top.

In a fast-moving company, it’s easy for small signals of progress to get swallowed by the next task. 

#kudos is how we slow down just enough to lock those moments in.

Most finance leaders agree on one thing: AI is going to transform finance. And much of that transformation started with OpenAI.

The technology they introduced has triggered a wave of change that is reshaping how companies operate, how decisions are made, and increasingly how finance teams work.

Which raises a simple question: how is OpenAI’s own finance team using it?

David Bhattacharyya, CFA and Wei Loke will be joining the "What-if" Summit to walk through how their finance organization is adopting AI internally.

People are exploring AI with a few use cases, but they haven't yet bridged the gap to a resilient operating model. 

Scaling AI responsibly requires knowing exactly where it adds leverage versus where it simply adds noise to the system. 

We will explore what CFOs should realistically expect from their teams in this next phase and how to structure investment across functions. 

Join the conversation and register today: https://lnkd.in/gCffk7ST

We 3x'd revenue and raised over $100M without increasing headcount and here's what every founder should learn from that inflection point.

At some point in every growth company, the instinct is the same. Hire.

Revenue is climbing, customers are coming faster, the roadmap grows, and the team feels stretched.

We hit that moment at Abacum.

And we paused.

Not because we wanted to prove a point, but because we wanted to understand whether hiring would actually accelerate us or just give us a safety net.

We ultimately chose to keep headcount flat as a forcing function.

It forced ownership. 
It forced real capital allocation discipline. 
It forced clarity on ROI. 

It also created the opportunity for us to put our own platform under real pressure and make sure Finance was truly shaping decisions, not just reporting them. 

The lesson is not that hiring early is wrong, sometimes it's 100% needed to get you to the next level.

But hiring can also delay the hard problems.

I wrote about this inflection point in Fortune last week, read the full article below in the comments.

Finance teams are being asked to answer a question that most planning tools were never designed for.

Not "what happened?"
Not "what could happen?"

But rather, "Which path are you backing and why?"

When targets move and decisions can't wait, rebuilding the model isn't the answer. Neither is another export, another version, or another "give me a few days."

Scenario Studio is our answer to that moment.

It's built to make trade-offs explicit, put options side by side, and help finance teams commit to a direction with confidence as opposed to just handing leadership more analysis to interpret.

Over the next few weeks I'm unpacking this shift in a webinar series alongside Christian Wattig,  Nicolas Boucher, and CJ Gustafson. 

We dig into where traditional planning breaks, where AI genuinely helps, and what it actually looks like when finance shows up to shape a decision instead of reporting after one is already made.

If you join, you'll also get a real backstage look at Scenario Studio in action.

The first session is tomorrow and you won't want to miss this series.

👉 Register here: https://lnkd.in/ec2BeUzh

Grateful to amazing customers like Helena Schoen from Pleo for sharing this feedback.

Implementation isn’t flashy. It’s hard work, and there’s almost always more ahead than behind. 

But when a sophisticated customer tells us they feel the impact already, even before everything is fully live, that’s when you know you’re doing something right.

What stood out to me here wasn’t just that the implementation is going well. 

It’s that the team feels supported, trusts the people working with them, and can already see how this will change the way they operate.

That’s customer obsession in practice.
Showing up consistently.
And caring deeply about the outcome, not just the go-live.

It's moments like these that make me incredibly proud of what we're building at Abacum and the team behind the scenes.

Everyone says their product is “AI-native,” but what does that actually mean in practice?

I recently spoke to Christine Hall about what this looks like inside finance.

First, the architecture has to support AI from the ground up. Most FP&A tools were built 20+ years ago, so AI ends up bolted on top rather than integrated into the system.

Second, AI needs to disappear into the workflow itself. Cleaning data, generating models, flagging anomalies while Finance teams focus on the analysis.

When those two things come together, Finance gains something more valuable than just speed.

They gain cognitive clarity, the ability to understand what’s happening in the business and drive performance.

Full interview with Fintech Nexus in the comments below.

Finance is the most under-leveraged function in the business.

Every meaningful decision eventually runs through finance. Hiring plans, pricing changes, GTM bets, capital allocation...Finance is where all those threads meet.

This positioning should make finance proactive by default. 
But in practice, it often does the opposite.

More often than not, finance is brought in once decisions already have momentum. A hire has been promised. A budget has stretched. A plan is already in motion. 

At that point, finance isn’t shaping outcomes, it’s reacting to them.

The irony is that finance is already at the center of the business, their leverage is built in.

Unlocking it isn’t about getting a seat at the table (which they already have), it's about having the right tools that truly empower them to accelerate performance.

I had an absolute blast covering this topics as well as many others last week on the etn. show with Luke Knight and Ronan Chambers!

One of the proudest moments of my career was the day I realized I was no longer needed. 

Years ago, I rebuilt a finance and strategy team across a 10,000+ person company. 

We reached a point where the team was killing it and I could disappear for a month and nothing broke.

My key deputy at the time managed teams independently.
The rolling budget process worked like clockwork. 
Models drove action and better results.
Emergencies were handled without escalation.

That kind of organization used to take years to build, last time it took me about 7 years. AI agents drastically compress that timeline. 

Automated agents can now handle the repetitive work that FP&A teams used to spend hours on. 

This fundamentally changes how you should structure your team. 

The new FP&A analyst is not a spreadsheet operator, they’re an agent manager and a strategic operator. 

Build around smart, creative, curious people who can adapt, solve a range of problems, and go out of their way to automate the grunt work. 

Hire correctly, and you'll find you'll need fewer people but those people will be essential.

If you're interested in this shift, I breakdown it down in depth in my weekly newsletter linked in the comments below.

Most FP&A teams are organized around first-order thinking. They're built to explain what happened but often not prepared for what happens next.

Are we hitting plan?
What’s our burn?
What changed this month vs last?

Necessary questions but inward-looking ones. 

The biggest shocks of the last five years probably didn’t start inside the company, they started somewhere else in the ecosystem. 

A customer’s customer slows down.
Regulations change.
Tariffs increase.
Capital tightens.

By the time those second-order effects show up in your forecast, they’re no longer “signals.” They’re revenue misses, cash gaps, or execution problems.

The strongest FP&A teams don’t just model internal drivers, they map dependencies.

Who do our partners rely on?
What drives our customers’ revenue? 
How sensitive are we to a shift in funding markets?

That’s where finance becomes strategic.

Not by predicting every shock, but by understanding exposure, identifying a few meaningful external signals, and building optionality before pressure forces the decision.

I write every week about the FP&A trends and challenges we’re seeing at Abacum (newsletter linked in the comments below).

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