Would You Rather Be Lucky or Good? Building FP&A From Absolute Zero, with Katelyn Stienen

Building FP&A from scratch isn't primarily a spreadsheet problem. It's a people, process, and alignment problem.Katelyn Stienen, Director of FP&A at Good Day Farms and a top-16 finisher at the Excel World Championship, joins FP&A Today to share what happens when you walk into a five-year-old business with more than 170 legal entities, around 10,000 budget lines, no dedicated planning system, and department heads who have never worked with a structured P&L. After experiencing established finance processes at much older organizations, Katelyn is now building the FP&A function from the ground up.One of her biggest lessons was that introducing FP&A is not as simple as sending out a budget template. Katelyn had to establish what a budget actually means, connect operational budgets with the numbers being communicated to leadership and investors, and create a common financial playbook across the business. She explains why bottom-up planning creates better accountability, why finance should approach variance conversations as investigators rather than enforcers, and how seemingly small misses across individual entities can become material when consolidated.The conversation also explores planning inside the highly regulated cannabis industry, when a growing company is ready for dedicated FP&A software, and how better systems can shift finance away from simply collecting numbers and toward understanding what is driving them. For Katelyn, the real job of FP&A is turning the stories coming from the business into numbers - and being able to explain why reality ultimately differed from the forecast.Key Moments● Building FP&A from zero starts with financial understanding, not templates. Before introducing a detailed budget, finance needs to understand how department leaders currently think about spending, forecasting, and accountability.● The business needs one financial playbook. Operational teams cannot manage against one version of the numbers while leadership and investors work from another. FP&A has to connect the two. ● Bottom-up budgeting creates better conversations. Greater line-item detail gives finance something concrete to challenge, explain, and manage with department leaders rather than simply holding them to a top-down target.● FP&A should investigate, not assign blame. Katelyn shares her Director of Finance's description of finance as "reporters" trying to understand what happened rather than punish teams for missing a number. ● Small variances can become