Bina Khatwani describes Airspeed as her FP&A AI analyst. Work that once took an analyst days or weeks now arrives in about ten minutes, ready to drop into her model.
Bina is Airspeed’s Fractional CFO. She works with several startups at the same time, helping each one build a finance function that scales and grow with confidence. In our latest video, she walks through how she uses Airspeed for financial modeling, budgeting, and board reporting.
Building a five-year plan from scattered data
Bina’s first task when she joined Airspeed earlier this year was to build the financial model: a five-year business plan setting out what the company could realistically achieve.
A model like that is only as good as the data behind it. Bina needed the actuals and the trends: pipeline, conversion rates, win rates, and retention. From that history she could forecast what comes next, and identify which numbers the business needs to improve.
The difficulty is that this data rarely lives in one place. One system holds the pipeline, another holds conversion stats, and someone has to pull it all out. That person is usually an FP&A (financial planning and analysis) analyst, who extracts the figures, arranges them in a Google Sheet or Excel file, and turns them into something presentable enough to form assumptions.
Airspeed now does that work for her. It gathers the data, analyzes it, and hands it back in the format her model needs, in roughly ten minutes rather than days or weeks.
Budget season, with data you can trust
With most finance teams working to finalize their 2027 budgets before the end of December, Bina is using Airspeed here too. A budget starts with the year’s trends, then layers in hiring plans and growth plans to show what next year could look like.
What gives her confidence in the output is where it comes from. Airspeed connects to the systems the business already runs on, including HubSpot and the wider CRM, the invoicing tool, and Xero. Because it pulls from all of them, the information is live and accurate before it is analyzed and shaped into the format she needs.
Two revenue numbers, one clear bridge
In a SaaS business, the most important working relationships run between sales, product, and finance. Sales and finance matter most, and they often count revenue differently.
RevOps and sales tend to look at when a contract was won, so revenue may be booked but not yet billed. Finance looks at what has actually been invoiced. Both numbers are valid, but leadership teams see both and understandably get confused.
Ahead of every board meeting and management meeting, Bina has to reconcile the two. As she puts it, two definitions of revenue are fine, as long as everyone understands how they connect.
Airspeed builds that reconciliation for her, live. At any moment she can give investors and the board the KPIs they want to see, knowing they are accurate and that she can explain the gap between definitions.
Taking the strain off sales and RevOps
Revenue is the largest part of any budget, and building its assumptions usually means leaning heavily on sales teams and RevOps analysts. They are busy, their priorities compete, and the request puts real strain on them. Too often, it becomes the bottleneck that stops the budget being ready on time.
With Airspeed’s AI agent collating and analyzing the data, that pressure falls away. Bina sees a better outcome too: sales and RevOps now join the process at the level of insight and value, rather than spending hours gathering figures and formatting them. The working relationship between the teams is stronger for it.
Watch the full conversation
For a CFO, Airspeed replaces days of manual data gathering with live, connected numbers: a financial model built in minutes, a budget grounded in accurate trends, and a revenue reconciliation ready for any board meeting.
Hear Bina explain it in her own words in the full interview on YouTube. To see what Airspeed can do for your own finance team, book a demo.
Frequently asked questions
How does a CFO use Airspeed as an FP&A AI analyst?
Bina Khatwani, Airspeed's Fractional CFO, uses it to gather pipeline, conversion, win rate, and retention data, analyze it, and return it in the format her financial model needs. Work that once took an FP&A analyst days or weeks arrives in about ten minutes.
Which systems does Airspeed pull finance data from?
Airspeed connects to the systems the business already runs on, including HubSpot and the wider CRM, the invoicing tool, and Xero. Because it pulls from all of them, the numbers are live and accurate before they are analyzed and shaped for the model.
How do you reconcile booked revenue with billed revenue for the board?
Sales and RevOps count revenue when a contract is won, while finance counts what has been invoiced. Both are valid. Bina uses Airspeed to build a live reconciliation between the two, so she can show investors and the board accurate KPIs and explain the gap between definitions.
