The modern planning playbook: insights from the CEO of Rillet

‍Let's talk about annual planning. You launched the consumer neobank N26 in the U.S. and other international markets. You also went through a number of annual plans there. What have you learned about making planning effective for finance leaders?

I can’t emphasize enough how important clean source data is for successful financial planning. It just makes downstream workflows and discussions so much easier. 

So the earlier you start, the better. And it doesn’t have to be perfect—nothing is. We need to move fast, but anything you can do to establish clean data early on will help you immensely down the line.

That’s something we learned at N26: starting early with clean data is mission-critical and saves you days and days later on. It might feel like a small decision in the moment, but it has a huge impact.

The other thing that’s often underestimated by finance people trained in accounting and numbers, is just how differently we operate from the rest of the organization. As finance professionals, we’re used to our world of numbers and spreadsheets, but not everyone is. Heads of Marketing, Growth, HR, or Product—they might not even know how to calculate DCF or what a balance sheet looks like. They might’ve heard these terms once or twice, like you might’ve heard about some technical framework as part of a hallway discussion once. So, you have to be fully aware of your audience, and adjust the language accordingly. You have to bring them along on the journey of what you’re doing.

And I learned this the hard way. I used to come in, all guns blazing, with my model, with everything perfectly tied-out, clean formulas, well-thought-out assumptions, and nice outputs. I’d drop this in front of everyone, and start tweaking numbers and things like that. But the reality is, people had no idea what went into getting to that point. They want to be brought along and educated so they can actually help—and feel empowered to support you as the head of FP&A or whatever your role is.

Know who you’re communicating with, where they’re coming from, and adjust your approach accordingly. To empower other people to be involved is just as important as the spreadsheets and numbers. Because, in the end, a business is just a group of people.

What’s holding finance teams back from communicating clearly with other stakeholders?

A lot of it comes down to systems and processes. 

Having good systems in place is crucial. They need to let you do your best work, give you the time to communicate effectively with stakeholders, and handle everything outside of spreadsheets. That’s priority number one.

Then, processes. A solid, clear process with defined timelines and deliverables is just as important (like setting dates for the first draft, board meeting etc). You have to communicate that plan clearly, and while software can help, sometimes it’s as simple as a well-timed email or Slack message to keep everyone aligned. Just make sure people feel empowered to help you stick to those timelines and deliverables.

If you have these two things in place, the right systems to support your work and tight processes to keep things moving smoothly, then I think you’re set up for success internally. That’s what lets you focus on the people, the strategy, and ultimately help your leadership team achieve the company’s mission and goals.

As the founder of an ERP, you're supporting a lot of finance leaders these days. How are they approaching annual planning differently now?

I’d start by saying that the bar for good FP&A work and strategic planning has really gone up over the last few years. There are a few reasons for that.

First, I think the economic environment has fundamentally changed from what it was five or seven years ago, when everything was up and to the right. And frankly, back then, the value of a good strategic financial plan wasn’t as high because things were naturally growing in the right direction. That’s changed.

Second, just the awareness around the tools available now—and what they can actually do—has increased. And the people doing FP&A have gotten more sophisticated as they hop from company to company. And also there’s the demands from investors and execs, who are expecting more rigor and detail in financial plans given the economic climate. So overall, what’s expected from FP&A professionals, accountants, or CFOs has definitely increased.

And I do think there’s a lot more focus on profitability and unit economics. There are a lot of surveys and benchmarking tools out there that people can use now to compare metrics across businesses on a very granular level.Understanding unit economics and benchmarking is becoming an essential component of every CFO’s toolkit.

The other trend I’ve noticed is that while the planning process has become more complex, team sizes haven’t grown—they’ve gotten smaller or more linear. There’s less appetite for big FP&A or finance teams. Everyone is doing more with less, and while finance has strategic value, it’s still just a G&A line item. So, teams are leaner, and people are more resourceful, and they’re using the right tools and smarter modeling to get the job done.

These two trends—higher expectations and smaller, more resourceful teams—they actually make it an exciting time to be in FP&A or finance. The bar is higher, but there are also better tools to meet that bar, and I think the role has become much more important in today’s organizations than it was, say, five or ten years ago.

Any advice for finance people going through their first annual planning cycle?

My experiences with financial planning—whether it’s gone well or not—have always revolved around the journey I took with my management and executive teams.

As an FP&A professional, one of the most tactical and critical elements here is actually empathy. I mean, you could be a hotshot analyst, fresh from private equity or investment banking, super good with numbers, intelligent, hardworking, and all that. But the reality is you’re dealing with people who don’t live in your world and, frankly, might not even find it all that interesting.

Just having the self-awareness and the patience to bring people along on that journey is key. If you’re doing this for the first time, that’s probably the most important thing I could share with you.

Another piece of advice: figure out how to get others involved in the process. When you bring stakeholders from other teams into the planning process, they’ll actually be incentivized to help you out. They’ll want to look good with you in these meetings with a solid budget, a well-thought-out forecast, and a plan to hit or exceed that forecast. Make it a team effort, where everyone is working together to impress internally, and that’s how you hit those external goals as a company.

There’s a psychology here that can be surprisingly effective. Because when people feel invested, when they feel like they’re part of the process, they’re more likely to be on board and committed. Now that might sound like a lot of extra work—or maybe not the reason you got into finance—but it’s something that can make a big difference in your career as a finance professional or CFO.

Let's talk about the finance tech stack. How did your experience at the N26 shape your perspective?

So a bit of context: I was with N26, a neobank from Germany that grew fast across Europe and then also expanded into the U.S. and other overseas markets. 

The challenge with going international quickly—which many European and now even U.S. companies do—is that your tech stack starts to fragment as you move to country after country. Each country has different rules to watch out for, different software providers, and before you know it, you’ve got a Frankenstein stack with multiple ledgers, invoicing systems, payment solutions, and banks.

Some of this fragmentation is unavoidable—it’s part of going international and complying with different rules. But as a finance professional, it’s crucial to be thoughtful about how you build your tech stack. In the short term, you might need quick fixes, like some tool to get you over the hump. But you definitely need a plan to eventually consolidate everything into one cohesive setup.

At N26, specifically, we had multiple ledgers across multiple jurisdictions, which became a headache to manage. So part of why we’re building Rillet today is because of that frustration. It’s so important to find ways to bring information together in a structured way, whether that’s through spreadsheets or software, and to establish processes and data labels at the most granular levels early on. And if you don’t, you end up with dirty data, which makes it nearly impossible to consolidate later.

When you have data that’s all lumped together without detailed tracking, it always creates friction down the line. And then budgeting and forecasting become challenging, because there’s no accurate historical database to work from. So, as you scale your tech stack, even if it’s not perfect from day one, just make sure you’re setting up consistent data labels and processes with a very clear vision of how it all ties together. It’ll definitely save you a lot of pain later on.

How did your financial tech stack at N26 impact the annual planning process?

We had a very fragmented stack with multiple ledgers across multiple countries. And because we were a fintech, there was this added complexity with moving money around, which meant we had to maintain separate ledgers for that too. What that meant in practice was a lot of data piping into Google Sheets or other software just to make sense of all the data sources.

This approach had its advantages: it was accessible, and gave us a real-time view of the business. But I think the downside was that it was difficult to audit where the data actually came from. You couldn’t easily drill down—it was like working with a bit of a black box. Plus, with some of these massive spreadsheets we built, just the amount of time we had to spend waiting for cells to load was insane.

Now that kind of setup might be fine if it’s just your finance team using it, and they’re okay with slow loading times and data that’s hard to read. But if you want your data to be usable by, say, the Head of Marketing, it needs to be digestible. And that was a key learning for us. The tech stack we had was functional, and at times it was cutting-edge given what we were dealing with, but it wasn’t always easy to trace the numbers or to make it accessible to other teams.

Eventually, we went through one of those huge system implementations. First, we tried to patch things up with spreadsheets and stop-gap software solutions to keep things going. But at some point, we just ripped off the band-aid and actually spent a year implementing a big legacy software system. Was it better? Sure, it was better. But did it meaningfully transform everything? Not really. Many of the same issues persisted.

So, my tactical advice would be twofold: first, choose the right system for your ERP from the start. And second, make sure the data mapping and modeling are accurate and make sense for your growing company. 

You launched N26 in the U.S. and in other countries. What lessons did you learn about expanding into international markets?

This gets a bit outside pure finance, because my roles there also included being the GM or chief executive of local markets. But one thing which is never to be underestimated is the amount of localization needed. Adapting your current product to fit local needs is always a bigger challenge than you’d expect.

So you start with something that works well in your home country, and the assumption is that you can take that success and replicate it in a whole new geography or with a different market segment. This can also apply if you go cross-vertical into different buyer segments with a B2B product. But there’s always much more first-principle thinking involved than you’d think.

And the temptation is to start with what you already have, and work backwards to make adjustments for the new market. But a better approach is to ask what this market actually needs, and then tie that back to what you already have. It’s a push and pull, of course, but running those two exercises in parallel—starting from first principles and from what you already know—will get you much better results than just trying to adjust what you have to fit a supposedly similar market.

Let’s talk about AI in finance. What should finance leaders look for in AI-enabled tools?

There’s so much buzz around AI right now, and a lot of people jump in, only to have false starts. I think the key thing is to focus on AI in a way that’s practical—how it helps you today, not some distant vision of the future.

For finance professionals, I’d recommend focusing on AI use cases where you still have agency—where you can audit and verify what the AI produces. I think the worst outcome is a black box—where a chatbot or algorithm spits out numbers, and nobody understands how it got there. I don’t think that will or should be the AI experience in finance. 

I think the AI experience in finance will be more about enhancing existing workflows by having AI automate specific steps.

One of the use cases that work well today is flux analysis—where you analyze changes period over period. This is something AI can do well today. Another area where machine learning is powerful is pattern matching. So if you have transactions that are regularly classified a certain way. The likelihood of a future classification according to the same sort of parameters and results is extremely likely. So AI can learn from this and apply the same classifications in future transactions. It can handle all the repetitive work and you can just verify it.

Another use case is document reading through OCR. Large language models have gotten really good at parsing PDFs and picking out the right information. That’s something we’re seeing rapid adoption of, both from software vendors and finance teams.

Then there’s the fully automated book close, where everything runs without human input, and I think it’s still a few years away. But these initial use cases—flux analysis, transaction classification, and document reading—are where finance professionals can start seeing real value from AI right now.

Do you think AI is coming for finance jobs?

I feel very strongly that AI will not replace accountants or finance professionals fully. But it will greatly enhance productivity and the work done at companies.

Very specifically, if you look back over the last couple of weeks, there’s probably a gap between what you actually did and what you ideally wanted to do—or what your CEO or investors wanted you to do. That gap between what you're actually doing and what you should’ve done is very large, and AI can take on some of those repetitive tasks. It can free you up to work on the strategic, high-impact work that actually matters for your company.

So, I’m very optimistic about the role of AI in finance and accounting. I think AI will make these roles even more impactful, and allow us to contribute at a higher level.

Can you tell us about Rillet, and how it ties into all this?

Absolutely. At Rillet, we're building a next-generation ERP. It’s a general ledger accounting system, but reimagined for today's world. Think of it as if NetSuite were built from scratch today, specifically designed for SaaS and usage-based companies.

Very specifically, imagine closing your company's books in real time—with no delays, no endless reconciliations. That's our vision—making zero day close a reality. It'll take many years to get there, but the idea is to get as close to that vision as possible.

And that’s the core problem we're solving—the inefficiency in financial closes. Right now, closing the books is a manual, time-consuming process. We want to automate as much of that as possible, turning accountants from doers into reviewers. Because software should handle the grunt work, and allow humans to focus on reviewing and strategizing. So, by doing this, we hope to make general ledgers the source of truth of financial information. This will help businesses to take more informed decisions quickly, and streamline their financial planning.

Why is this the right time for a new ERP in the market?

There are a few key things to consider when you look at how ERPs have evolved over the last 20 years.

First, a lot of legacy ERPs are built as horizontal platforms—and they try to be everything to everyone. But many industries have very specific, deep vertical needs that any horizontal product just cannot address properly.

So we always joke that NetSuite is a mile wide and an inch deep, while we’re a mile deep and an inch wide. That focus actually allows us to build a product that truly captures the specific workflows and needs of certain niches, like SaaS, which is a large enough market to build a specialized product for.

Second, AI is really starting to change the game for finance and accounting—though maybe not as quickly as in other tech-focused fields. So either you have a core system that maintains all financial information at a very granular level (ready for machine learning or generative models), or you don’t. I think a lot of legacy systems, because they’re so horizontal, weren’t built for the AI era. They don’t really have the depth of data needed to support sophisticated AI applications.

For these two reasons, I think we’ll see a big shift over the next couple of years. Legacy players are likely to unravel as more specialized ERPs like Rillet pop up with powerful, AI-driven solutions built for the needs of specific industries.

Finally, any best practices you'd like to share for getting annual planning right?

Start early. Start earlier than you think you need to. I know that never really happens, but starting as early as possible makes a big difference.

It doesn’t have to be with perfect numbers; it’s more about getting buy-in from the beginning. Just go around the virtual or physical room, let everyone know that planning is happening, share the timelines, and tell them what you’ll need from them.

Even just getting a high-level gut check from your leadership team and CEO on what they want to achieve, before you dive into all the sophisticated modeling, can save you time and keep everyone aligned. So yeah, good stakeholder management is critical here.