Preston Flowers

Senior Consultant With Proven Experience in Financial Planning & Analysis

Preston is a Partner of Columbus Consulting. Preston is a highly successful financial planning and analysis professional with over 20 years of experience in retail finance. He brings extensive experience in budgeting, analytics, modeling, and financial system development across all areas of the business.  As a personable and approachable problem solver, he focuses on developing and implementing programs and systems to support financial strategies.  Preston manages each project with strong attention to detail, outstanding leadership and communication skills, and ability to produce top quality results in a deadline driven environment. 

Experience

• Palo Alto Networks – Solution Architect
  • Implemented the Strategic Finance P&L and 3-year driver-based strategy models.  Developed complex expense and cost of goods allocations across multiple products, cost centers, and accounts.  Published scenario planning visualizations, variance analysis, and allocation breakdown dashboards connecting the organization to fully allocated plans.
• Exabeam Inc. – Solution Architect
  • Phase 1 – Provided a robust assessment of unsustainable components of the original build and additional best practices for future implementation.  
  • Phase 2 – Performed major re-build replacing a custom version list with the native version list over the income statement, cash flow, balance sheet, and workforce planning modules.  Redesigned workforce planning process with more automation for full-time and contractor heads by consolidating logic and improving Anaplan performance.  Implemented an ALM environment to create dev and test environments while allowing users to continue to work in production.
• Dollar General Corporation – Senior Director, FP&A
  • Led the development and implementation of the Anaplan Finance Roadmap,  including implementing retail inventory method gross margin and warehouse/logistics expense models leveraging the Anaplan Connected Planning technology platform. 
  • Responsible for process redesign and implementation of a series of Anaplan applications to support corporate Expense Planning/Forecasting. This included headcount planning for approximately 1,200 Corporate employees, to drive Payroll and Payroll Fees. Also supported Net Income and CapEx modeling and forecasting.
  • Led strategic budgeting and forecasting for areas including sales, gross margin, SG&A, warehouse/logistics expense, and capital expenditures.