Why I Started FP&A Nxt — And the Sunday Evening It All Clicked

A cabin, a glass of red, and a message sent at 20:22 that changed everything.

It was a Sunday evening. July 13th, 2025.

I had spent the week travelling for work — client meetings, project delivery, the usual pace. Then came a small break, a drive up to Haugastøl, and a simple cabin in the Norwegian mountains that I have been going back to for years. Earlier that day, a long hike. By the evening, finally, the kind of quiet that is hard to find anywhere else.

I was sitting with a glass of red. No agenda. No laptop open. Just the kind of stillness that only arrives when you have actually stopped moving.

And then it hit me.

The Moment

I grabbed my phone and fired off a message. It went to two people simultaneously: Erik Lidman, founder and CEO of Aimplan, and Andreas, Chairman of the Board and CMO. The time stamp says 20:22.

The message, exactly as I sent it:

"Sikkert jeg som er evig treg, men
Fabric
PowerBI
&
Aimplan,
(...)
Antar du skjønner man skal lese første bokstaven nedover (FP&A)"

(Translation: "Probably just me being forever slow, but — Fabric / Power BI / & / Aimplan — I assume you get it, read the first letter downward: FP&A.")

Within thirty minutes, Andreas had already started building a LinkedIn post around the idea.

That is the thing about a genuinely good insight: it moves on its own.

What the Double Meaning Actually Is

Let me spell it out, because it is worth sitting with:

FP&A — as every Finance professional knows — stands for Financial Planning and Analysis. The discipline. The function. The work that sits at the heart of every well-run organisation.

But read the modern FP&A tool stack the same way:

The same four characters. Two complete meanings. Both true at the same time.

A post about Fabric pipelines is a post about Financial planning infrastructure — because that is what the pipeline serves. A post about Aimplan forecasting is a post about Analysis — because that is what it enables. The tools and the discipline are not separate topics here. They are the same topic.

That is the niche. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Why the Numbers Matter

When Andreas built that first LinkedIn post, he included something important: the evidence.

Because this is not just a wordplay observation. The tools at the heart of FP&A — Fabric, Power BI, and Aimplan — are delivering real, measurable results for real Finance teams. The Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study on Microsoft Fabric (2024) found:

• 379% ROI over three years
• 90% reduction in time spent searching, integrating, and debugging data
• 25% increase in productivity for data engineers
• 20% uplift in output for business analysts
• One CFO reported saving 20–30 hours per quarter by moving financial reporting to Power BI

These are not hypothetical projections. They are outcomes from organisations that made the move.

At Kokai, we are seeing the same patterns with our own clients across the Nordics: fewer manual processes, faster insights, and Finance teams finally spending their time on strategic thinking rather than data wrangling.

The stack works. The question is how to use it well.

Why This Site Exists

Here is what I kept noticing: the technical documentation exists. The vendor release notes exist. What is missing is the translation layer.

Someone who can take a product update and explain — in plain language — what it actually means for an FP&A analyst doing month-end reporting. Someone who can show a CFO not just what Fabric can do, but how to build a Finance team that can actually use it. Someone who is honest about what works and what does not, because they are in the field every week, not just writing about it.

FPandANxt started because I wanted to be that layer.

But there is something more important than that.

The most exciting thing about the moment I described above — Erik responding, Andreas posting within thirty minutes, the idea moving before I had even finished my glass of red — is what it demonstrated. When the right minds, with the right shared understanding of where things are going, start moving in the same direction together, something new gets built. Faster than any one person could build it alone. Better than any one perspective could make it.

That is what I want this site to be.

Not just a place where I broadcast what I know. A place where practitioners, Finance leaders, curious analysts, and experienced controllers come together to map the territory honestly. What works. What does not. What looked promising and turned out to be the wrong path. Honest reviews alongside the tutorials. Real experience alongside the theory.

We are all — Finance professionals, data practitioners, Finance leaders — navigating the same new era. And we get better together faster than we get better alone.

What to Expect Here

Every week, FPandANxt publishes content across three areas:

Stack — Practical tutorials, tips, and release note breakdowns for Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, and Aimplan. The how. Built for Finance professionals, not developers.

Craft — The knowledge behind the tools. Because a controller who can build a data quality checker in a Fabric Notebook also needs to know what data quality means for their month-end close. The tools are powerful. Understanding when and how to use them well is what separates good from great.

Lead — For Finance leaders and Managing Partners. How to build teams that are curious and capable. How to lead when the frontier is moving faster than any training plan can keep up with.

All demo files and templates are free. Always. Sharing is how we all get better.

An Invitation

If you are reading this, you are probably already somewhere on the FP&A frontier — whether you are an analyst who has just started exploring Power BI, a controller who wants to understand what Fabric can actually do for your data, a CFO trying to figure out how to build a team for the next decade, or a leader who just wants an honest view of what works and what does not.

This site is for you.

And if you build something, try something, or learn something the hard way — share it. In the comments, on LinkedIn, anywhere. The map of this new era gets better every time someone who has actually been somewhere adds their notes to it.

Data is this era's gold. The map is still being drawn.

Stay curious.

— Espen

Espen P. Kringstad is Managing Partner and CEO of Kokai Consulting, a Business Intelligence and FP&A consultancy based in Norway. FPandANxt is where he shares what he finds — every week, no fluff.
LinkedIn