Looking for new opportunities to grow and wanted to know your mindset ? Many thanks.
When leaders spend their time building instead of leading, they drift from the one thing they were hired to be great at.
That seems counterproductive for any organization. To be clear, I’m not saying they should stop. I’m trying to understand who does the actual leading while they’re heads-down building.
Titles like CEO, CFO and CISO exist because someone has to own those decisions.
And if the answer is “AI will handle it,” that’s a way bigger claim than anyone’s admitting. AI can draft the budget model, but it can’t own the call, answer to the board, or take the blame when things go wrong.
So genuinely asking: is building now part of the leadership job, or is something quietly falling through the cracks? Thoughts?
I was talking to someone who works in private banking and they mentioned that business email compromise has made large wire transfers a lot more stressful than they used to be. I always assumed the standard process was pretty simple, if a client emails a wire instruction you call them back on the number you already have on file before doing anything.
But then he also told me about SIM swaps and call forwarding and it made me wonder if that process is still considered enough. For people working in banking treasury or family offices what does verification actually look like today? Is it mostly dual approvals and internal policies or are firms starting to use identity verification tools as well? I saw Kibu mentioned in an article about secure communications but I don't know if it's something people actually use or if callbacks are still the norm.
Is there literally anything else?
As a CFO what else would you need for a standard month-end pack.
For the basis of a month-end pack, non‑negotiables:
1. Flash report (KPI, cash, EBITDA)
2. TTM P&L with variances
3. Balance sheet snapshot YoY
4. 13‑week cash flow forecast
5. AR/AP aging summaries
6. Covenant calc & headroom
Trying to get a real read on this before building anything. When your auditor sends over a sample selection list (say 100-200 transactions) and wants supporting docs, what does the process actually look like for your team?
Specifically curious about:
Not selling anything, genuinely trying to understand how big a problem this actually is before deciding whether it's worth building a fix for.
It feels like every financial app today solves one specific problem:
* Budgeting * Investing * Banking * Insurance * Credit cards
But none of them seem to understand your complete financial picture.
Do you think we're missing a layer that actually connects everything together?
Or are current apps already enough?
Does anyone have any experience in certified payroll on commercial projects? I've got a situation where the customer is questioning why our hourly rate is a lot more than what's indicated on certified payroll. I'm trying to justify why we charge what we charge per hour even though we are lower on our hourly rate than any of our competitors.
Took over our APAC finance ops about two years ago. Industrial group, parent in Europe, four entities in the region (China, Japan, Singapore, Australia) all on different expense tools when I inherited it. My predecessor had started a global standardization project the year before me. Corporate IT had picked Concur, the rollout plan was 18 months, and the Manila SSC was supposed to retire their hand-maintained consolidation Excel once everyone was on the same platform.
Singapore and Australia migrated cleanly. Japan was awkward because the qualified invoice rules that came in a few years back are wired into the approval chain in ways the default Concur config didn't handle, but workable after some custom work. China is where the project stopped.
The fapiao verification piece in Concur is only fully integrated if your tenant is deployed on the China data center. Our global tenant runs in the EU so we couldn't get the native flow, and the third-party validator we layered on top covered the common general VAT fapiao but kept missing special VAT and travel-specific receipt formats. Local AP ended up double-keying anyway. The local approvers were also routing things through DingTalk groups outside the system because that's where the work actually happens, not on a global tool's web UI.
After about ten months of trying to make those gaps workable we accepted the global answer wasn't going to work for the China piece. We split the architecture: Singapore and Australia stayed on Concur, and we put China and Japan on Helios with a shared tenant. We evaluated two other regional tools first but Helios was the only platform in our shortlist where fapiao OCR held up at our actual transaction volume and the JP qualified invoice approval routing didn't need a custom build to match how our Tokyo entity actually books expenses.
If you're starting a similar rollout, my read is to scope the China piece out from day one rather than treating it as exception handling on the global path. The consolidation back to group reporting is still a manual treasury reconciliation every month, and our European FP&A team had to learn a few APAC tax categorization conventions that don't have direct EU equivalents. We never solved either part cleanly.
I've been talking to early stage SaaS founders for the past few months about financial operations. After 40+ conversations, I have a hypothesis but I want to stress-test it here before I over-engineer anything.
The hypothesis: most Seed-to-Series B founders are doing scenario planning, CFO-level analysis, and fraud/expense monitoring manually in Sheets, in their heads, or not at all — because the tools that exist are either priced for enterprises or require a full-time finance hire to operate.
Three honest questions:
What I've found so far from conversations: most founders know they should be doing more scenario planning and expense monitoring. Almost none of them are doing it consistently. The blocker isn't knowledge it's that the workflow is painful enough that it only happens before board calls.
Curious if that matches your experience or if I'm pattern-matching off a biased sample.
Happy to share a summary of what I've heard from the 40+ conversations for anyone who engages not a lead gen play, just trying to build something that actually solves a real problem.
Hi everyone,
I’m actively looking for a remote job as an Operations Manager in the business finance space.
My experience includes:
I’ve helped build and manage operations from the ground up and perform well in fast-paced, results-driven environments.
If you’re hiring or know of any openings, please feel free to DM me. Thank you!
Shipping is one of those cost centers that tends to just grow with revenue and nobody questions it until margin starts getting squeezed, the assumption is that it scales proportionally and there is nothing to optimize
But the reality is that carrier contracts drift out of alignment over time as volume changes, rate structures get stale, and billing errors compound without anyone auditing them
For companies spending north of 100k a year on small parcel alone, the shipping cost savings available from just auditing invoices and rebenchmarking rates can be material enough to show up on a quarterly earnings discussion
Hey guys, I’m genuinely confused and would really appreciate some advice.
I’m currently pursuing a [B.Com](http://b.com/) (Hons.) from DU, and almost everyone around me is focused on finance. I’ve started developing an interest in it too.
However, my dad works in supply chain in Dubai in a global leadership role. He often works with companies like DHL and Aramex, and his role involves making decisions that impact large-scale operations. He also regularly interacts with senior executives, including CFOs, so I value his perspective.
His view is that supply chain gives you a much deeper understanding of how businesses actually function how products move, operations run, costs are managed, and decisions are executed. According to him, finance is more about allocating capital and interpreting numbers, whereas supply chain teaches you the operational know-how behind those numbers.
Now I’m stuck between the two. Finance definitely interests me, but I also don’t want to overlook the opportunity to learn from someone with decades of experience and strong industry exposure.
For those who have worked in either (or both) fields, what would you recommend? Which offers better long-term growth, learning, and career opportunities? I’d really appreciate any insights or personal experiences.
They just appointed their third CEO in 18 months, and if you've been following the financial news this week, it’s a roller coaster. CEO resigned so the stock dropped drastically, then they appointed the new guy and the markets recovered a little. And thats the news we are seeing: money is coming back up so YAY all is well, transition success!
Well, I spent my morning reading through Glassdoor reviews to see if that's really the vibe (which, honestly, says a lot about me, but lets ignore that shall we?)
Frank Bisignano ran the company for five years, he then abruptly left for a position in the current administration in May 2025, and his replacement Mike Lyons came in and immediately described the earnings targets as "objectively difficult to achieve." Undermining everything the workers had been told to work towards.
Obviously the stock collapsed nearly 50% after the CEO said "Bro, no way we can do that." As CEO, Mike Lyons spent a year cleaning it up, and from the reviews he did a decent job building a new foundation. Then he stood up on stage at investor day last month, smiled and told the room they had made "meaningful change across leadership and culture" and then resigned 30 days later with no severance, just poof, over to a bank. Now Takis Georgakopoulos, who joined the company in late 2024, is suddenly CEO.
The Glassdoor reviews going back to 2019 describe a workplace where compensation plans get rewritten mid-year, leaders change every six months, and announcements of culture change are followed by more of the same. The only consistent positives across thousands of reviews were "you get paid on time" and "the employees are great."
Here's the part I find genuinely fascinating from a human dynamics standpoint.
There's a concept called learned helplessness. When people experience repeated cycles of disruption where their actions produce no reliable outcome, the brain eventually stops trying to influence outcomes at all. Layer on top of that change saturation, which is the point where enough reorganizations and leadership announcements have happened that the brain stops processing new ones as meaningful and starts filing them as noise. "Meaningful change in culture" from a CEO who leaves 30 days later ends up sounding like the teacher from Charlie Brown.
What Georgakopoulos is actually walking into is a strategy that is probably solid, but also a workforce that has spent three years learning not to believe it.
That is going to show up six months from now when everything stalls and nobody can explain why.
What you actually need in that moment is an outside perspective, someone not embedded in the org chart or invested in the narrative, who can tell you whether people are genuinely moving with the change or have just gotten very good at looking like they are.
One thing I’ve noticed after building and managing 13-week cash flow forecasts across different companies is that the real value isn’t the forecast itself.
The value is the conversation.
A weekly cash forecast forces organizations to answer uncomfortable questions:
Are collections actually occurring when sales says they will?
Which vendors are mission-critical versus simply “always paid”?
How much runway do we truly have if revenue slows?
What decisions need to be made this week instead of next month?
What surprises me is how many companies still treat the process as a manual spreadsheet exercise.
Finance teams spend hours every week:
Exporting ERP reports
Cleaning data
Copying and pasting into Excel
Updating formulas
Chasing department owners for assumptions
Then repeat the entire process seven days later.
My view is that the future of FP&A isn’t building more complex models.
It’s automating the repetitive work so finance can focus on decision-making.
Imagine a process where:
ERP data refreshes automatically.
AP/AR aging updates automatically.
Actuals roll into the forecast automatically.
Variances are highlighted automatically.
The CFO only reviews exceptions and decisions.
The finance team’s time should be spent answering “What should we do?” rather than “Why is the VLOOKUP broken?”
Curious how others are approaching this.
How much of your 13-week cash flow process is automated today?
Very interesting Forbes article published a few weeks ago and current hot topic in amongst companies I'm connected to.
AI companies have pushed "tokenmaxxing" to measure dev productivity by how many AI tokens they burned. Predictably, this was a financial disaster.
Uber reportedly blew its entire AI budget in four months, and one company accidentally torched $500 million in one month on uncapped employee Claude licenses.
Now, the pendulum is swinging to "valuemaxxing." Microsoft announced cutting unchecked subscriptions and demanding ROI. Imo days of treating expensive compute as a vanity metric are over and the focus is officially back on basic finance 101, removing redundancies, and strict usage caps.
How is has this conversations gone if when you spoke to your tech leaders? Whats the best way to think through this?
Seems like a few different groups of thought so far. RPA, AI, and the good ol fashioned excel sheet weekly meeting. What's the consensus around AI thus far?
Hello there. I work at a logistics company. We are now trying to optimize our purchasing process. So we used our ERP mostly for purchasing through it. But the problem is that more than 100 employees need access just to create to submit purchase requests and attach quotes. And because of this licensing costs increase (per seat). Additionally many employees find it hard to work with, maybe because it is designed for finance teams.
I mean, from our finance team’s perspective our ERP works very well. I am just not sure if we are building correct process around it or not. In this situation, would you as a decision maker keep purchasing inside your ERP or have a separate intake system? Interested in opinions and experiences of finance teams.