Budget Battles, Politics, and AI: CFO Anna Tiomina

Anna Tiomina, MBA has faced?multiple FP&A challenges in a 15-year finance career. This has included budget nightmares, all-nighters, and the stark realization that “politics” is central to any FP&A or finance role. The former CFO of Sandoz, a huge pharmaceutical company,?describes her move to finance chief at Softeq, a smaller IT and consulting firm. Most recently she has pivoted to become a fractional CFO helping finance professionals bridge the gap between “curiosity and confident AI adoption”. In this honest and frank interview, Anna describes some of these experiences: with host Glenn Hopper :

1. Challenges of Learning New Things in Full-Time Finance Roles: "When you are in a full-time executive role, you don't have enough time to even start looking at these new things. And AI space is so dynamic, you, you need to block some time to get there."

2. Structuring FP&A - Big vs Small Companies: "It's not easy to compare them because the big company and the small company are like two different worlds when it comes to FP&A. For instance in a smaller company I couldn't afford having a separate finance or FP&A person in every of the offices"

3. FP&A Team Structure Comparison: "Every person on the team was wearing multiple hats. So it was either an administrative person doing some office management and doing some FP&A on top, or we would hire someone from finance, but then we would add something else to their role."

4. Budget War Stories: "The night before this review was planned to take place, someone from the region contacted me and they said, you know what? We have a new standard that you need to now use dots instead of commas as decimal separators... So yeah I spent a night redoing and rechecking everything."

5. Non-Accountants Handling Accounting: "One of my key people on the team managing a lot of accounting stuff is not an accountant... she needs really a lot of oversight on, in, in the accounting layer of what she's doing... she ended up doing accounting just because, you know, somebody asks her, do you want to take this additional responsibility? And she said, yes."

6. Agility in Budgeting: "A lot of companies are now trying to implement some higher level of agility in the budgeting... in the tech company, I had monthly recalibrations on the budget going pretty deeply into the layers... because the environment is so rapidly changing and the expectations of the leadership team is for the CFO to be able to keep up with this change."

7. Safe AI Implementation in FP&A: "I think that the paid team subscription for ChatGPT is safe enough for the company to use it on some internal data. Not like social security numbers, but like contracts probably. You could use it on company financials, even if it's not a public company. It's not like your balance sheet wont be on the internet tomorrow"

Catch the full interview:

Apple| Spotify| Blog post and transcript

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