Oh no. Not again. 

I sat back, flustered, dread creeping in – my laptop crashed. 

My stock based compensation spreadsheet was so close to done. It was comprehensive, tabularly blessed, and best viewed on an ultra widescreen monitor. I built it to take as many data lines, by employee, as Excel would allow. Coworkers came to me, to view the glory of this data – and because it was too big to share. 

Does this sound familiar? So much of my headcount spend forecasts lived in spreadsheets, measured according to custom formulas, data coming from every different department in so many different formats, at the whim of IT and ghosts in my machine. 

This view into my job as finance leader, at Adobe and other companies, is just one 30-minute slice, and yet, it exemplifies so much of what finance leaders wrestle with – that Precanto solves. 

Back to my former office. As I awaited an IT miracle, two people stopped me. 

Our compensation director handed me a confidential sheet of equity grant recipients and asked if I could incorporate the financial impact of these grants before our afternoon financial forecast sync, for an effective grant date right before period-end close. I made a mental note to visit our equity administrator to ensure I had the correct valuation assumptions.

My accounting manager emailed our team to ask if all current tax entries were booked and accounted for, and if there were any future tax implications to consider. How was I going to run the tax implications of these confidential equity grants before the afternoon financial forecast sync – especially with a broken machine? 

I walked by the tax manager’s office, whose door was closed, with a picture of a smug looking man in a boat holding a fishing pole in his hand.  I suppose I would not be discussing the tax impact of these grants, either.

I never had a great way to update my next period financial forecast quickly and accurately, much less my current year to date financial forecast for SBC.

This is why I joined Precanto. 

As an experienced enterprise finance leader, at Adobe and elsewhere, I may have been tabularly blessed, but I felt frustrated. I dreamed of a day when I could spend more time on strategically advising the company based on data, rather than spending so much of my time gathering and corralling the data itself, from so many siloed departments. 

At Precanto, my goal is to facilitate a way out from underneath the data cleansing and validation race.  Such traumatic experiences described above should and can be avoided for a company’s largest spend, so a more useful strategic lens can be applied and timely insights can be provided back to the business groups we support.  

Precanto will not only help you get and stay organized with headcount forecasting, it will move along with you as fast as you need it to and as often as you encounter updates that need to be refreshed and reflected.  You will always be able to speak to your headcount data in the next impactful readout.  

I’m happy to talk with anyone about our product, my experience, and the power that I am seeing in this headcount forecasting platform. 

Learn more about Precanto. Book a demo today.