Next-Level Financial Modeling with AI and Automation for CFOs with Chase Wright

Tell me about that worst model you've ever seen.

It was basically all written in BBA and I had no idea what BBA was. It was an absolute nightmare for somebody.

Coming into what'd you learn from that experience? What did you take away?

Took away that there's different ways to solve problems.

You're a startup, you generally don't have a data warehouse. Getting your data all together in those early days is often a nightmare. That's why you're seeing the startup and what Equals is really solving right now.

100% Yep, agreed.

If there's one thing you can't live without, that Equals has you wish Excel.

And Google would adopt the way that that Equals has made it. Anybody could figure it out very quickly. That's a really powerful thing to do.

What's your favorite part about building a three statement model?

I have to put on my hat. I have to think critically. Financial modeling and spreadsheets make me do that.

What's the key to building a robust financial model?

It's really important to the longer that I do this, the more and more I.

Welcome to Financial Modeler's Corner where we discuss the art and science of financial modeling with your host, Paul Barnhurst. Financial Modelers Corner is sponsored by Financial Modeling Institute. Welcome to Financial Modelers Corner. I am your host, Paul Barnhurst. This is a podcast where we talk all about the art and science of financial modeling with distinguished financial modelers from around the globe. The Financial Modelers Corner podcast is brought to you by by the Financial Modeling Institute. FMI offers the most respected accreditation in financial modeling and that is why I completed the Advanced Financial Modeler earlier this year. I am thrilled to welcome our guest to the show this week, Chase Wright. Welcome to Financial Modeler's Corner.

Thanks Paul. Great to be here.

Yeah, really excited to have you. One of the things we're going to talk about today just set the stage and then we'll go through your bios. We're going to talk a little bit about a new spreadsheet tool out there in addition to financial modeling called Equals that Chase is using. But before we get into that, let me give a little bit of Chase's background for you. Chase is an experienced finance executive with a strong background in driving financial strategy and optimizing operations for growth. Currently he is the Head of Finance and Data at Unicode. Chase has also served on the Customer Advisory Board at Cash Flow and is a limited partner at Fog Ventures. With over a decade of experience, including roles at GitLab, Instabug, Red Hat, and More. He brings expertise in corporate finance, data science, and business management. He holds a master's in engineering from the University of Alabama, Birmingham. So welcome with me, Chase, to the show. Chase, tell me about that worst model you've ever seen. Tell me that horror story.

Yeah, so it was. I was straight out of grad school and hopped into a IT consulting company working under their cfo, and I got connected to their. Their main model. And the main model was. Was basically all written in bba. And I had no idea what VBA was at that time, how I was going to actually operate this model. And there was a lot of disconnect between the VBA code that was being written and what was being put into the. The actual spreadsheet. It was an absolute nightmare for somebody coming into more of a junior role, trying to figure out how to understand vba. But, yeah, that was. That was kind of like my first jump into, you know, the FBA side of the house, so to speak. From a finance perspective, that sounds like.

A nightmare model, all with vba. What'd you learn from that experience? What'd you take away?

Yeah, I think what I took away was, you know, this was an IT consulting company. All they did was really focus on working and helping customers out from a software perspective. And it actually helped me understand, kind of you can do more with a spreadsheet than just, you know, Excel modeling and some keywords and stuff like that that's in the spreadsheet itself. So I actually took away that there's different ways to solve problems, but the spreadsheet is kind of like the core place for all of us to do our thinking, and it's a really good way for us to build our storytelling.

I mean, it's amazing how fabulous the spreadsheet is as a prototyping tool, modeling so many different things you can do with it. So I totally appreciate that. I want to ask. I'm curious. You got your bachelor's in finance, then a master of Engineering. How did that combination happen? You generally. You see people do. Engineers that often go back to MBA school but usually don't see the other way around.

Yeah. So I think anybody that knows me, it's. We'll say that curiosity normally gets the best of me. At that time, it was really out of necessity and curiosity. I was working at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, as a. As an accountant. I was making $27,000 a year, and I was like, how. How am I gonna actually figure out life? Like, what is. What does life look like? If this is what it Looks like now. And the first. The first thing, and it may have been ignorance, it was just simply like, I think I need to go back to school. I need to go to grad school. Because that seems to be all the. Everyone else is doing that, that seems to be successful.

Yep.

I'm young.

That seems to work. That's the path.

That was the path. Yeah. And I had met the. The program director there, Dale Callahan. He was an entrepreneur himself. He took me in with open arms. And at the same time, I'm a very frugal person. The University of Alabama, if you were an employee there, they subsidize the tuition. So that helped out tremendously.

Yes. Anytime you can get most your education paid for, it makes it much easier to make the decision. I'm with you. My wife would also say, I'm a very frugal person. So how has that helped you in your work, doing that? Masters of Engineering? I mean, are you glad that's the program you took? How has it kind of turned out for you?

It was a pivot. Like, I think at different points in your life, you can look back and say, like, this was a pivotal moment of my life, for sure. That was a pivot. That was 100. A pivotal moment in my life. I. I met a couple of friends that I'm still good friends with. This was, you know, 10, 12 years ago at this point, and I joined that IT consulting company. And at that point, you know, I. I went from fine core finance to finance slash. I'm really interested in figuring out how to do this from a software engineering perspective. So I'd worked under their CFO for two, two years, and I'd ask him, hey, can I go into the consulting pool? At that point, I had learned SQL. I was still doing a lot of financial analysis, but I'd learned SQL at that point to help out some of these bigger customers that we were working with. And that, you know, had I not had that education at that point, the curiosity that kind of drove me that way, you know, I wouldn't have been really where I'm at today.

Yeah, it's. It's amazing how those pivotal moments happen that change. Change our life. Frankly, I still remember the pivotal moment that seven years later led to me starting a business. You know, it was quite a bit later, but there was a pivotal moment that started to where I'm at today, and I'm incredibly grateful for it. And sometimes it feels like it was chance or luck or whatever you want to call it, but I'm grateful it happened. I am totally with you. All right, we're going to talk about Equals for a while. So how about we start. Can you give our audience an overview of what Equals is? I know it's a. They build themselves as a spreadsheet. Spreadsheet interface, but maybe just give that 12 minute kind of overview.

You know, when I look at equals, it comes from a fundamental problem that I think a lot of us have. It's the spreadsheet is there. It's this blank slate, but we don't have any data associated with it. So, like, how do we. Where do we get the data and how do we actually make use of it? So it's not. When you do copy paste and dump it into a spreadsheet, your spreadsheet doesn't crash. So Equals to me is very much a modern spreadsheet for modern either data teams or finance teams.

Okay, got it. So what I think of is the modern spreadsheet for data or finance teams. I know. We'll talk a little bit more about it. I saw this week they just announced a warehouse component.

They did. Very exciting.

Yeah. And so we probably get into that for a minute. But first, how did you find out about equals? Like, how did you learn about it and what led to you implementing it? Because, you know, so often in finance, we hear it's Excel. Excel for everything. Right. It's like Excel's my hammer, and I don't care if I have a screw or nail, I'm going to make it work. And I think there's something to be said for that. But there's always different tools that can make certain things easier. So how did you find out about it and decide to use it?

Yeah, so it was a few. A few different things. The first one was when I was at GitLab. We were. We were trying to. The CFO had a mandate for us to be able to get all the information from our core KPIs into our data warehouse into our dashboard that everybody in the company could look at. And we were like, how are we going to do that from a financial perspective? So it was me and two other folks came up with this idea. It's a tool that's still open source today, and I'll add it into the chat and you can maybe share that later. But it's called sheet load, and the simple premise of it was take data whether that was actually connected anywhere or not, put it into a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet then goes into the data warehouse and then is viewed by the front end tool that we had. So that was, that was one area that kind of led me down this path to finding Equals. And I'll get to the main point in a second.

Sure.

The second point was Bobby had the same issue at, at Intercom in the early days of Intercom. So we kind of like were going.

Bobby'S the founder, right? Bobby Pinero, I believe.

That's right. So he's a co founder and CEO of Equals. And I think it was about a year or two ago I was talking to one of my former colleagues that helped out with Sheet Load and she said, hey, check this new tool out. It's called Equals. They're trying to do something that we were doing at GitLab. One thing led to another. I talked to Bobby, I was like, I'm on board. Like, I'm again, curiosity getting the best of me. Like, let's, let's see if I can make this work for us.

Got it. And so that's how it started. You'd done something similar. So it sounds like you're using it to help pull your data together. And so why is it a better tool than say, Excel and Power Query or Google or what is it you like about Equals that makes it easy to kind of bring your data in and be able to load it into reports? Maybe talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, good, good question. So another fundamental shift for me Career wise was 2014. I joined my first startup. I came on board and the CFO said, here's your Mac. And I was like, I, I've never used a Mac before. I don't, I, I don't know how to. And, and at that time, Excel didn't exist for Mac. So like there was nothing other to use than Google Sheets. So it came from, again, like a necessity of me figuring out how to basically use something else outside of Excel. You know, I think, I think the difference, you know, versus Power BI or anything else like that is once you join kind of the Mac world, the Microsoft piece, or at least at that point in time was, was not really relevant. Like if you had a mic, if you had or use Excel, you were probably a Microsoft shop, so you had a PC, yada yada. So for me it was figuring out like, okay, I'm not using Microsoft, I'm not using Excel anymore. How am I going to make this work? And it really just became me figuring out what tools can I use, what's out there? And over time I've just kind of stuck with it. Now I think there's other tools out there that do just the same but maybe serve as a different part of the industry. So you know, you got your Apple or Mac users, your PC users. It just works for us. And I think it works for a lot of like the Bay Area companies that I've worked for in my career.

Yeah. And if I'm not mistaking, I believe a couple things they're known for from everything I've seen. I've talked to Bobby a few times and played with some. Is one the, the way the SQL no no code slash using SQL interface works and the data comes straight back. You can kind of see it all at once for a lot of systems you may have to do all the work there and then pull it into the spreadsheet. Second, I believe they've added some dashboard components are really easy to take that data and visualize it So a little bit like a spreadsheet slash bi tool and you can refresh those. Are those some of the things that you're really using it for and where it's kind of shines or am I thinking about it wrong?

Yeah, so the. Where I use it and I'll kind of take a step back here and talk about modern data infrastructure and where that didn't exist, you know, even prior to 2018. You know, like the, the companies like FiveTrans, Stitch, they all started to come out around 2018 which made it easy to get, you know, data from all of your source systems. We use Stripe here for our billing, we use Salesforce. It made it really easy to get that information from point A to point B. And what Bobby did was say, hey, you know, I still have to be able to connect this data and figure out like analysis. Whether it's my go to market team focused on how are our marketing campaigns performing X, Y and Z here. But you're still taking that viewpoint from a financial perspective, equals is very much like we're not trying to reinvent the will here. We're just trying to make it a lot better. So the spreadsheet still exists today, but we're now connecting to the modern data infrastructure. So you can connect all your source systems and then pull it into equals and, and do your analysis. And you know, that used to take a lot of folks a lot of time and you know, it's just me doing a lot of stuff in the FBA side today and it's, it's like all I have to do is click five buttons and I and I'm connected and I'm ready to do analysis and equals.

We are seeing that more and more where a blending of kind of spreadsheet with data. Right. Database data, like the warehousing they've done. Source Table has something similar. They're a new tool I kind of say is similar. Equals. Rose is another. And we're seeing that connected, not just connected, not just cloud, but kind of that ease of bringing in your data. And you want it to be just a click of a button. I think if you're doing a lot of transformation and you want to be able to shape it any way you want, Power Query is fabulous. But if you want to click of a button and just bring it all in, a lot of these new tools make that easier.

100%. Yep, agreed.

And, and so that, that to me seems to be their strength. Especially if you're a startup, you generally don't have a data warehouse. You usually aren't investing in a BI tool. And getting your data all together in those early days is often a nightmare. And so it feels like that's why you're seeing the startup and what equals is really solving right now versus necessarily being a powerhouse spreadsheet. Is that a fair.

Yeah, I would, I would, I would say it, it comes from the necessity of being the first finance hire and knowing that pain and yearning for something more like, why isn't there something more out there that just makes my job so much easier. And a lot of the times like, and maybe you've dealt with this before, Paul, where you're so far into the weeds on analysis that you get, you know, what's the saying, like analysis paralysis and you can't pull yourself out and figure out, hey, what was the narrative that I'm trying to tell or figure out here?

Yeah. And so I'm curious, does your company also use Excel? Do you use Google Sheets, or are you doing everything in equals?

Yeah, so we. Good question. You know, I think every place that I've been there, there is some mix of Excel, there's some mix of Google Sheets, and there's some mix of maybe something else. It's the same case here. You know, I, I'm, I've been using Google Sheets almost exclus exclusively for, since 2014. There's, there's, you know, the last probably two or three years have been a pretty big outbreak in terms of like new modern tools that are coming out that makes things easier, like equals. But at the end of the day, you know, Excel is still there and it's, you know, it's not going away now. Do I use it often? Not really. I use it for, you know, downloading, basically downloading Google Sheets into Excel files and sending them to either our investors or just because I need to be able to download something and send it to somebody else. That's generally what I'm using Excel for today.

So what are you using? Are you using Google Sheets? Are you using Equals to actually do your financial modeling? I'm assuming you're a startup, you're doing a three statement model. What do you think is best for that at least where you're at right now?

Yeah, good question. Equals and or Google Sheets can do both. I use Equals today for our ARR reporting across the board. So we have two different, Unicode has two different brands, unicode.com and the QR code generator.com we have multiple product lines and we use Stripe to do all of our billing, invoicing and payments. So I'm using all of that for our err, reporting. It does a fantastic job just connecting equals. I can connect to Stripe, pull it in and do my analysis there. And there's a couple of other things that it does really well. So I'll give you two other examples. The second example is I'm able to actually curate a spreadsheet that I send to our senior staff. And our senior staff basically is the members that make up like the revenue lines of the business. And I can tell them week over week like you know, here's, here's how much err you've added to, to the top line this week. Here's where we're at this quarter and here's the goal and I can do that through Equals and I just basically connect Equals to Slack and send that report out. And every Monday morning there's a, there's a fresh report that says here's how we're performing and we have a pretty good dialogue around that. And Equals made it super simple to do that. The last piece is a three statement financial modeling. I've got my three statement financials in there and ultimately I want to be able to have a way that you click through like here's where our top line information is coming from. It's all modeled and equals and it's coming into the top line revenue numbers. And Equals is able to connect to GL accounts. So we use QuickBooks here for our US entity. I'm able to connect that and have a clear understanding of our cogs and opex and yeah and after that it's just, you write a couple of formulas just like you would in Excel or Google and you've got your three statement Financials somewhat automated and it's pretty awesome.

Yeah, I've analyzed their formulas. I think they have about 120. All the major ones. They don't have everything. I know they're still working on some of the dynamic array stuff that has been big in Excel the last few years. It's Google's had for a long time. But you know, all the base formulas you'd need for your typical model are there.

Yeah, 100%. And I'm not, I'm probably not the most definitely not the fanciest like Excel modeler. So I probably could, yeah, probably could speak to that. But they have everything that I've needed there so far in terms of, you know, Excel, Excel commands.

Perfect. What, what is your favorite thing? Like if there's one thing you can't live without that equals has or something you really like that you wish Excel and Google would adopt. Is there one, one thing in particular that stands out?

A lot of startups use Slack and being able to like communicate a specific viewpoint or narrative around what you're trying to describe in terms of how the business is operating and just post that to Slack so everyone else can see is, is really easy to do. Now could you do it in Excel and Google Sheets? Probably. But the way that that equals has made it. It's. I mean anybody, anybody could figure it out very quickly. It's, it's so intuitive and, and useful and it gets everybody on the same page of what we're trying to go after. I think that's a really powerful thing to do.

That intuitive nature. I'm sure with Power Automate or some of the other things you could write. You could do it with Excel, but it's not a click of a button type of thing. It's not naturally integrated teams, different story. But again, startups usually aren't a Microsoft shop. It's usually a little less expensive. To go another route is typically what you see, at least in those early days.

That's right. Yep.

That makes sense. All right, so let's talk a little bit about financial modeling. What's your favorite part about building a three statement model? What do you enjoy?

Yeah, I think the thing that I love about it most when I think about modeling itself, I love that I can just start with a blank slate. So I'll go into Google Sheets sometimes or I'll go into Equals and type in like sheet view into the browser and I'll just start. Okay, like what am I trying to figure out? What am I trying to articulate? And the thing that I think spreadsheets do really well is it helps you think through the problems very, very precisely. Whereas like, you know, if you're trying to do something else that's a little bit more ambiguous, you know, you could go all over the place. I think spreadsheets, you have to be very explicit about what you're trying to do and accomplish. And I think that's what I love about financial modeling. Like I have to, I have to put on my hat. I have to think critically. And financial modeling and spreadsheets make you do that.

FP and a guy here and as you know, I am very passionate about financial modeling and the Financial Modeling Institute's mission. I have been a huge fan of the FMI for years and I was super excited when they decided to sponsor the Financial Modelers Corner. I recently completed the Advanced Financial Modeler certification and love the entire experience. It was top notch from start to finish. I am a better modeler today for having completed the certification. I strongly believe every modeler needs to demonstrate they are a qualified financial modeler. And one of the best ways to do that is through the FMI's program. Earning the accreditation will demonstrate to your current and future employers that you are serious about financial modeling. What are you waiting for? Visit www.fminstitute.com podcast and use code PODCAST to save 15% when you enroll in an accreditation today. I like how you said the critical thinking. You know, you didn't say anything about formulas or this or that, but that, that thought process, it sounds like that's what's challenging you is really thinking about how do I build this in such a way that it's valuable.

Exactly. And I think the thing that it helps you articulate as you go out and just have conversations with, you know, different, different teams. I had a, a former CRO, tell me, Chase, all you're doing is just a spreadsheet exercise. That's not actually how the business operates in general. And I said, you're right about that. But have you thought about all of these different scenarios? And because I had that thought process of critically thinking about it, I wouldn't have been, I wouldn't have been able to like stand my own ground in that. In that regard.

I, I love that you're able to say, yeah, I get it, but here's these different scenarios and now let's talk about it because right, a spreadsheet, the whole idea is to approximate the business. We all understand it's not the business. It's not accurate. As I always like to say, if I could be accurate in forecasting. I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing right now. I'd probably be in the mountains, hiking or camping or fishing. Because I would have made a lot of money in the market if I knew how to forecast that out.

That's right.

We all be there.

Yeah. Yeah, agreed. I wish, I wish I was that smart. But 90, what's to say, 99% of. Of forecasts are 100% wrong? And I think that's been. Been true for me.

Yeah. Well, it's like if there's a quote I really like, kind of along the same lines. But George Box, he says, you know, all models are wrong. Some models are useful, you know, and I just, I, I really love that idea because, like, the idea is to be useful. It's not to be right. Not, not. That's not the goal of planning. Yes. You have to be directionally correct. If you're 50% off all the time, especially head count, or things that in a mature business that aren't really changing, you're going to lose your job. There's, there's a threshold you have to meet, but there's still a lot of subjectivity, especially. I'm sure you've done a lot of startup. You've always been right on your forecast. Right. Never had a problem.

Yeah, that's right. Every, every annual plan that I've put together has been perfect. We've never missed anything. And, you know, that's why I'm, that's why I'm at my fourth startup, so.

And that's why you making big bucks. I mean, you're living in a mansion there, right?

That's right. Yep.

Gotta have fun with it. You know, we've talked about kind of modeling the part you like. What's the key to building a robust financial model? Like, do you have a certain way you like to start when you're building a model or maybe talk a little bit of some of those key things to make sure you don't end up with what I like to call a Franken model or a useless model. Is George Box.

Yeah. You know, I think it's really important to. The longer that I do this, the more and more I remove myself of the modeling mindset and more like how, how can I put myself in the shoes of others to kind of help them get to where they need to get to? It's like the, the, the Jerry Maguire quote we were talking about earlier, like, help me help you and I, and then I. Can you articulate that into some type of model itself. So I think it depends on what we're trying to go after. And I'll give you a recent example of what we're trying to accomplish here at Unicode. We are trying to figure out our business is a fantastic business by all accounts today, but we want to continue to grow. Growth is sexy and that's what VC backed companies like to talk about. And we want to continue to grow. So what we're trying to figure out and articulate is like, what are the big bets that we're going to go after this year? What do they look like and how do we actually materialize those into go to market plans and then basically put some kind of financial analysis behind it that says, yeah, this feels right. I think we can hold ourselves accountable to going after a plan like that. So that's one example. I think another example that I could probably give is three statement financials. The thought process about that is, you know, how well is the business doing not only from a P and L perspective, but like the balance sheet. Like how like. And most people don't talk about balance sheets a lot. And I think that those are one of the most powerful places to actually have a conversation, especially when you think about, you know, do we make an acquisition, do we think about rolling out, you know, a product line on its own? So it helps me articulate that and you know, having that framework together in those sense again makes, makes the conversation a little bit easier. So I can help, so I can help everybody else help themselves essentially.

Got it. I, I love what you said there at the end. Right. It's about, it's all about helping the business help themselves. Models are there to guide, inform, improve decision making. At least they should be. Unfortunately. Sometimes we like to go with our gut and just willy nilly and ignore the model and sometimes it works out. But there's been plenty of times where you're like, I think I told you so.

Yeah, I try not to, I try not to say that too often.

Agree. You don't want to say that too often.

Yeah. Even though I think about it quite a bit.

Yeah, exactly. All right, so next question. Favorite Excel shortcut? Do you have a favorite shortcut? I know you were on a Mac for a while in Google, so you might not have one, but do you have a favorite shortcut?

Yeah, so I'll keep it. Like I said earlier, I'm not, I'm not the most elegant user and I'll keep this in kind of straightforward. At least on a, at least on a Mac it's Command C, Command V. Copy paste.

Control C, Control V. Yeah, I never did shortcuts. I still did those. Those are just so helpful.

Yeah. And I use it more. You know, I think if I. If I go back and look at all the really elegant formulas that I've written or shortcuts that I've done, that one's still, you know, I've got. If I look at my computer, I've got basically marks of Control Z, Control V here, my keyboard.

Do those work in equals Control C and Control V?

They do, yes. It's the same experience.

That's what I thought. I knew they had some similar shortcuts, but I wanted to ask somebody confirm that. All right, next one. What's the number one lesson you've learned during your career that's helped you the most, other than being on this show?

Yeah, this is. This is. Yeah, Paul, this is the number one for sure. Number one lesson. The second lesson is just. Just actively listening. You know, I think a lot of times, I don't know if everybody's personality, if you kind of have to stereotype, you know, FPA in general, we're very high execute people. Like, we've got to get a lot of stuff done and we generally have very lean teams. So I'm always like, let's go. Like, this is. This is when I think about it and I feel 95% confident that I'm right about this. But more times than not, and the longer that I do it, I've been wrong. So, like sitting down and actively listening to what people are actually saying, understanding what, what that means from a business and mechanics perspective, it. That's 100. The. The older I get, the, the more and more I listen and the more and more I keep my mouth shut.

There. There is something to be said for that. I listen to my first episodes or I listen to some of my episodes and I'm like, I think I talk more than the guest. Shut up, Paul. There's some real value there. Right this. So this is the first time we've asked this question. It's a new one. We've kind of. We've. We've added funnest thing or funniest thing. What's the most unique thing you've created a model for in your own life? You know, fantasy football, whatever it might be.

Yeah. So I've got a really interesting one there. There was a gentleman named Felix Zoomstein, and he was the creator of XL Wings. And maybe.

Yes, I'm familiar with. I've seen him. Has Python in it.

Yeah. So he. He created this. This. This tool called XL Wings that connects into. Into Microsoft Excel. And I was a big fan of this show called Bloodline. I think it came out in 2015 on Netflix. And the one thing that I remember about Bloodline is they said the F word so much that it almost embarrassed me how often they said it. So what I did, I was like, I want to know how many times they actually said it. So I actually downloaded the script for each episode, loaded it into XL Wings, and then dumped it into Excel to do some analysis on, like, the results. And the results were, I think, like, 28F words per episode. That was probably the funnest.

How long was an episode?

It was like, maybe 30 minutes. An hour. It was. Yeah, it was very. It was. I think it was the most that I've ever heard out of. Out of any TV show or sitcom that I've ever watched. So I don't know if that's the funniest thing, but it's definitely, probably one of the dumbest things that I've done from, like, an Excel perspective.

Hey, that works. We said unique as well. I like it. I think people have done probably similar things all in their own way. All right, we're going to move into our rapid fire section. This is one of our favorite sections of the show. There's a couple ground rules. We're going to do a little different. We've done similar to this before. I'm going to ask you the questions for Excel, kind of how you think about them. Then we'll talk about equals, and you can either say it's a yes, no, or doesn't apply. For equals, it's a yes or no. For Excel, you get no more than about 10 seconds to answer. So the idea is to be quick. Then at the end, you can elaborate because I get some of these can be. It depends, but we don't want to hear any depends. No. No consulting answers.

Okay. Understood.

Ground rules make sense.

Understood. Yep.

All right, Perfect. Circular or no circular references and models?

No, no circular references.

VBA or no vba?

No vba.

I figured after your horror story, you would say no vba. Do you prefer a horizontal or vertical layout to your model?

I prefer horizontal, for sure.

All right. Dynamic arrays. Yes or no? No external workbook links if you.

If you can't help it. No, I mean otherwise. Yes.

Yeah. Basically, try to avoid them at all costs. If you can. Named ranges. Use them or not.

No. No name ranges.

Do you follow a formal standards board like some of those out there smart and fast. And some of the others when you're modeling?

I do, yeah. I use, I use fast for that.

So you follow fast.

Perfect.

Will Excel ever die?

No, it'll. It'll be there with Twinkies and cockroaches at the end of the day.

You do know Equals is probably listening. They might be picking up the phone. Come on. All right. Will AI build the models for us in the future? Perhaps.

I think in the short term they will be. AI will be fantastic for co pilots.

Makes a lot of sense. Do you use sheet cell protection in your models? Yes or no?

Yes.

All right. Do you believe financial models are the number one corporate decision making tool?

No.

What is.

I would say, you know, at the end of the day, I think it's the intuition from all the inputs that somebody that, that what a. What we, what I would call a directly responsible individual would, would make. So it's, it's intuition at the end of the day, but it's, you know, I would say that financial models are a very heavily weighted part of that decision making process.

Definitely a big part. My favorite answer I've got, and I've got it a few times was no, it's politics.

Yeah, that's a good one.

We could all relate to that one, right? We, we all get that one, right? Favorite lookup function. Choose Vlookup, Index Match, xlookup or something else.

Vlookup almost exclusively Index Match if I have time.

All right, I like it. All right, now we're going to run through those that apply and you can say if they don't apply. Obviously the last two we don't need to go through for equals. So circular or no circular references. Does that apply in equals?

It does, but I wouldn't. Yeah, again, no. No circular. Yep.

I'm going to guess there's no VBA in Equals sequel.

That's the beauty about Equals is having being able to use SQL.

Yeah, I know they're big on SQL. Horizontal or vertical won't matter there. Do they have dynamic arrays and Equals?

That's a good question. I don't know. Bobby is probably going to be upset with me that I don't know that, but I don't know.

All right, fair enough. External workbook links, I'm guessing aren't a problem, are they? Can you link to external workbooks?

You can. It's definitely something powerful that they have. Again, only if you have to do it.

All right, Same rules apply. Named ranges.

Named ranges. Again, I don't know, but I would say No, I think that one's a pretty specific thing in general, but I. I don't know.

Got it. Well, I think that kind of covers the differences. Before we head into the wrap up, any anything else you'd like to. You'll mention to the audience? Any of these you'd like to elaborate on your answers?

Yeah, I think one thing that I didn't see about Excel Shortcut versus Equal shortcut. So Equals has the shortcut, at least on a Mac. It's Control K and it's kind of like the spacebar on a Mac. Basically, you can search your entire MacBook. Control K or Command K for Equals gives you the ability to basically ask a question to their AI and it's incredibly powerful to the point where you don't have to do a handful of stuff. You just say, hey, by the way, sum up this particular column for me or add a border around this particular range for me. It's a really powerful concept that is getting into that next evolution of spreadsheets. I've had a lot of fun with.

It, so you're finding it's really helpful. How much time is it saving you? Do you find you're using it daily or how often are you hitting that Control K?

I use it. I use it almost daily. If not, if not every hour. I found myself becoming more and more lazy. I don't know if that's a good thing for us as a.

We like to call it smart, not lazy.

Yes. But they have definitely made it a lot easier to do things that, you know, may take a little bit longer to do as you're clicking around trying to figure out, like, what things you actually need.

I remember when they advertised they'd come out with the first AI based spreadsheet. They were, I think, first one to integrate chat GPT. And that's exciting that it's working well. It's how, it's amazing how generative AI is changing things.

It's a game changer for sure.

Yeah, no, I use it all the time. It's like summarizing transcripts for these podcasts. Fabulous to have AI do that before. I'm writing on my thing and I'm listening to each episode. I couldn't do what I do today if I had a listener every episode. Again, to summarize my, like, okay, you give me the summary and then I'll go, go pick what I want.

Yeah, you know, I think, I think for us though, in the, in the finance space and you, you, you probably may agree with this, Paul, is that as as AI and generative AI becomes more and more popular, like the finance folks are still skeptic, skeptic about like, you know, is this, is this perfection that that's coming out of it or is it kind of more just a co pilot to help us out with the jobs? I think we'll, we'll all kind of be skeptics and, and in that regard, at least like our cohort of folks that work in the business. But it should help us become more efficient, that's for sure.

Well, I mean, I think finance by nature, right, we're risk adverse, we're skeptics. Everybody hates the black box. You want to understand it all. And I think that leads to a slower adoption. You know, is that good or bad? Everybody can decide for themselves. I mean, the reality is, either way, generative AI is here and we all need to figure out how we can best utilize it. But I agree with you. All right, so as we conclude here, just have two more questions for you. So if you could share one piece of advice with our audience to be a better financial modeler, particularly around modeling, what would be that?

One piece of advice early on, learned the fundamentals, and it would be incredibly helpful had I had this where I could have taken, you know, a class like you have, or another gentleman that I know, Carl Tiemann, he's got a class. That's fantastic.

Yeah, he has some great stuff. I know Carl.

So I went to Wall street preps for kind of a crash course and that was incredibly helpful to kind of get me ready for what this was going to look like. I think the next piece is, you know, again, just taking a step back and trying to put yourself in the position of how is everybody else thinking about this business and what do we want to, what do we, what do we want to get out of it? So, you know, and rather than going in and trying to model stuff really quickly, just what is the long term thing that we're trying to accomplish and how do we put that into some framework that, you know, ends up being some type of spreadsheet?

I, I agree. Fundamentals, everybody needs to get that. I wish I had learned some principles of how to design a model and how to think about it, because I developed quite a few Franken models, as I like to call them in my day, and I'm in. Yeah, I look back now and I'm like, wow, that thing was terrible.

Yeah, I think, I think we've all had those experiences. Gosh, it would have, it would have been incredible to have a class like yours that, you know, I could have benefited from early on, but so is life.

Yeah, I think we're all there today. There's a lot more options, which is great for our staff. All right, let's get you a course. Let's go get you some advice from somebody who's been there. Because sometimes that's just invaluable. Yes, the school of hard knocks and learning yourself has its value, but it also sometimes leads to really bad habits that are hard to break. And so you have to figure, you have to know when that makes sense and when it doesn't. And someone who's in their early 20s, first job, they have no idea, they don't know what the right answer to that is. And I think we can help guide them a lot better today with all the options that are out there.

Agreed.

All right, so if our audience wants to learn more about you or get in touch, how should they do that?

Yeah, good question. I'm not on social media. I try to stay off of it as much as possible, but I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me at, I think LinkedIn/in Chaseright. Otherwise I, you know, I'm working on building unicode.com out currently right now, so you can probably find me there to some degree. Otherwise I'm in, you know, I'm in some Slack channels here and there. Yeah. And I think that's, that's about it.

All right, great. Well, I think LinkedIn is the most common answer we get, surprisingly enough, even if you're not on social media, most of us are on LinkedIn. That's. I'm not a big social media outside my business, so I get it. But totally appreciate you joining us today. Today, Chase, I know you're getting ready to go on vacation, so we won't take any more of your time so you can go enjoy it. But thanks for carving out some time and chatting with us today. I've really enjoyed it.

Yeah, yeah, likewise, Paul. Can I give one shout out to. To Bobby and the team at Equals. So everybody, that is if you want to save a lot of time in learning ARR reporting or if you're not an expert already, they've got a book called the ultimate guide to ARR. I think you can go to equals.comarrbook and get your copy. It's an incredible book. Had I known this about this in 2018, it would have saved me probably a year of my modeling life trying to figure stuff out. So it's incredible. But go check it out. It'll be well worth it.

Love it. I had seen they'd come out with that. I haven't had a chance to read it. I might have to go download me a version of it. That's great. Thank you for sharing that shout out there, Chase. And thanks again for joining us.

Yes, thanks, Paul. That was a lot of fun.

All right, thank you. Financial Modelers Corner was brought to you by the Financial Modeling Institute. This year I completed the Advanced Financial Modeler certification and it made me a better financial modeler. What are you waiting for? Visit fmi@www.fminstitute.com podcast and use code podcast to save 15% when you enroll in one of the accreditations today.