r/CFO

TLDR: tbh don’t read it, I’m just venting about my frustrations with using AI in finance. nothing intelligent to read here- just a rant. A lot of people I know love it, but none of them are using it for finance. This is me screaming into the void.

Over the past few months, my CEO has been having our company undergo a major AI push. Insisting that we maximize our usage of Claude as much as possible. Obviously, as a CFO, I am 100% behind maximizing the usage of any product that we are paying for. Get your monies worth! While I am a skeptic by nature, I do truly see the benefit of leveraging it.

Across all of our departments, I can see how using Claude more ultimately gives us better output, aids strategic planning, increases the team’s productivity, and blah blah blah all the great talking points about AI (for the love of God I get it, the stuff is great)

HOWEVER, for *finance specifically* I feel that I spend so much time correcting the AI, and catching its mistakes, explaining basic stuff, that I wonder if my time would be better spent doing the reports from from scratch my damn self. I won’t deny that some of the menial but tedious task that I ask the robot to do it will do perfectly fine. My frustrations stem from when I try to “maximize and leverage” my usage of Claude for more robust and time-consuming tasks only for it to be just as time-consuming for me to teach Claude to do it.

Over the last few months it has: fabricated numbers in reports that I GAVE IT THE RAW DATA FOR. It’s made erroneous, nonsensical assumptions for projections that I already gave it the assumptions for. It’s included inputs that, look good, but DID NOT ANCHOR to any source of truth provided. Only for it to apologize & admit that it’s wrong after I call it out.

Today was the straw that broke the camels back! The accountant sent over the recently filed 2025 tax returns so I use the opportunity to do some light bookkeeping, cleanup, and reconciliation to make sure everything was aligned. I uploaded multiple files for the robot to review and flag any anomalies. One of these files was the basic 2026 Jan 1st BoY balance sheet. Claude then uses it to send me this longgg analysis on why the Jan 26’ current year earnings was a red flag because it didn’t match the Dec 25’ current year earnings. Granted this is very basic and non-consequential and should not have pissed me off as much as it did.

But are you telling me that the amazing-wonderful-powerful-smarter than a human AI that everyone raves about cannot understand that a Dec 25’ balance sheet & Jan 26’ balance sheet would not have the same current year earnings-because they’re different years??? so now I have to spend my time explaining to the robot why it’s wrong and why i need it to do wtf I am paying it to do??!?

This can’t be the AI that everybody is betting their entire lives on! It can’t be, ain’t no way.

Maybe I’m using it wrong, and maybe I’m the problem. who am I kidding? Maybe I’m an idiot and I just don’t know what I’m doing. Or maybe this is some bullshit and a waste of my limited time omfg.

Obviously, I’m going to keep using it, but I would NEVER trust it to produce reports that haven’t been triple or quadrupleeee checked by ME - not another bs AI agent.

Rant over.

Month-end close can be brutal. Manual JE batch production is the bogeyman. For those of you in $100M revenue businesses which don't have optimal headcount and who are burdened with manual processes perpetuated by weak prior finance leaders, which software tools are you using with great success to semi-automate or fully-automate JE batch production? Not posting - batching.

Please, no "get Claude to build it," or "build an Excel model to do it."

Hi

I have been wondering for awhile who is qualified to be a Fractional CFO and who isn't and what does it take to be qualified to be one.

I want to be one but I do not think I am qualified to be one yet. I have been asking an AI for career advice based on my background and personality. Its recommendation was for me to become a Fractional CFO.

 

The AI's Reasoning:

The Foundation is There: CPA credential, accounting team lead experience, and prior consulting/ERP implementation. This is actual CFO-adjacent work, not entry-level.

 Strategic vs. Operational Fit: My cognitive profile ("Outlaw Sage," high openness, variable conscientiousness) fits systemic thinking, pattern recognition, and high-stakes judgment. The routine execution layer grinds me down; the strategic layer ("what does this mean and what do we do about it") is where a CFO lives.

 The Distressed/Turnaround Niche: My interest in struggling small businesses, combined with engaging hardest when stakes are real and problems are genuinely tough, fits turnaround advisory perfectly. It compensates for judgment rather than hours worked.

 Fractional vs. Full-Time: A full-time CFO at a small company risks trapping me in the routine conscientiousness-grind. Fractional work keeps me in high-leverage diagnostic and strategic modes across multiple clients, playing to my strengths without punishing my weaknesses.

 First Job (1 year): Accountant / Auditor

Worked for a small firm where we handled general tax work, but specialized in HUD audits. Our largest clients were hospitals undergoing HUD audits. These audits—if you can even call them that—focused on a single bank account that acted as an intermediary for the loan. The primary purpose of these specific entities was to help clients bypass HUD's extensive disclosure requirements.

Second Job (2 years): Fixed Asset Accountant, Sutter

Responsible for fixed asset accounting and managing the monthly close process for the accounts within my assigned region.

Third Job Contract/Temporary Roles (2 years): Accountant

Held various temporary positions covering miscellaneous accounting functions. Key responsibilities included fixed asset accounting, reviewing internal inventory controls, and assisting with accounting system and data migrations.

Forth Job Accountant / Senior Accountant (3 years):

Worked in a highly chaotic environment where I was frequently tasked with stabilizing high-priority, cross-functional projects. My experience included managing AP and AR operations, executing a payment system migration, and leading an AR data migration. Notably, I successfully rebuilt three years of missing accounting data, redesigned internal controls, and authored and implemented comprehensive accounting, AR, and AP policies while directly interfacing with external auditors.

My Reality Check: Why I Think I Will Fail Right Now

 Client Blindspot: I have never had a client. I don't know what to expect or even what to do day-to-day.

 Lack of True Management Experience: I have been a team lead, but I have never officially been "the boss" or a manager.

 Superficial Audit Background: I lack real audit experience; I have only audited shell companies for compliance reasons.

 Gaps in Core Operations: I do not have sophisticated AP/AR experience and possess limited payroll experience.

 Strategic & Technical Gaps: I have little experience with strategic financial architecture and feel weak in deep operational technicalities.

 

My Action Plan to Close the Gap

To get to the point where I feel competent taking on Fractional CFO work, my plan is to:

Earn a CMA (Certified Management Accountant) designation.

Take on a part-time, work-from-home bookkeeping role to get hands-on experience with diverse small business books and client management.

My current boss says she is going to train me to become a financial analysis. I plan to say with her until I feel like my training is complete.

Questions for Feedback

Am I overthinking this, or is the AI full of it?

Is my proposed plan enough to actually do the work of a fractional CFO?

What else should I be doing that I haven't considered?

Do you have any other advice?

Curious if anyone is using DoIt to help optimize cloud costs. I used in my prior company and it made reconciling very difficult, but the savings were substantial. Hosting costs were significantly more than my current company and I'm wondering if it's worth exploring.

I’m curious to understand how often CFOs look at their LinkedIn accounts and accept connection requests. It seems 9/10 CFOs might not value this channel. As a CFO, how do you like to get information that might make a difference?

A couple of months ago, FinBooks.ai was just an idea on a whiteboard.

Today, 38 organisations and 7 CA firms are actively using it.
The crazy part?

None of this started with “let’s build an AI startup.”

It started with frustration.
I come from a finance background, and I kept seeing the same problems everywhere:

•endless GST reconciliations
•manual bookkeeping
•spreadsheet chaos
•invoice mismatches
•hours wasted on repetitive accounting work

Everyone treated it as normal.
But honestly, it felt broken.

So we started building FinBooks.ai with one simple goal:
Make bookkeeping and compliance less painful for businesses.

The first few months weren’t about scaling.
They were about listening.

Every conversation with a CA firm or business owner changed something in the product.

One user asked for customizable MIS reports.
Instead of pushing it into a “future roadmap,” we built and shipped it.

That became our philosophy:
Listen closely. Ship fast. Simplify relentlessly.

Today, FinBooks.ai helps businesses with:
•Reconciles GSTR-1 and GSTR-2B against your books automatically
•Flags ITC mismatches and Rule 37A exposure
•Imports invoices directly from portal JSON into your books
•Real-time bank reconciliation
•MIS reports, payroll, and a virtual CFO assistant

Still early and improving. But seeing real businesses rely on something we built has been incredibly rewarding.

Would genuinely love feedback from founders, accountants, and finance folks here.

Website: https://finbooks.ai/

Hi all,
First post in here after lurking for a while. I’m a US CPA in the final round interview for a controller position. I’m coming from around 11 years experience overall, last 5 years in SaaS - management (manager and assistant controller). My last and final round is with the CFO ($50M SaaS company) and I’ve been told by the internal recruiter my technical background and interviews have all been good, but the CFO might drill me on “some balance sheet and other high level stuff”. Just wanted to get some perspectives / tips from other CFO’s here on what you’d look for / want to see out of a your controller. Nothing too in depth but any high level tips / things I can try and prepare for before this call in a few days.

Thanks!

I’m curious if anyone else is seeing something like this: I recently stepped into a fractional advisory conversation that was pitched as pure strategic growth planning, but within ten minutes of looking at the books, it literally turned into a forensic rescue mission.

It feels more like there's a growing trend where founders wait until the check engine light has been blinking for six months before they realize they need a CFO-level brain. They don't just want a strategy; they want someone to figure out why their burn rate doesn't match their headcount and where the last $200k went.

For people doing fractional CFO work, I’m trying to understand if you’re getting to do the high-level steering you were hired for, or also spending the first three months just untangling a spaghetti-mess of their accounting?

I’d love to hear those weirdest mess you’ve been asked to fix under the guise of an advisory role.

Hi guys. I'm building an outsourced bookkeeping and fractional CFO business. I'm not a bookkeeper, CPA or fractional CFO. I'm a sales and marketing guy who sees a ton of potential in this industry and know's how to get customers. Currently, I outsource all our work to another bookkeeping company. We have a white-label relationship. All the work is branded by my company, and customers pay my company. They don't know about the other company. They pretty much do what we do. We're just better at marketing.

My issue is this: I have no idea how I should be looking at this from the fulfilment/systems perspective. I have no idea if pawning off leads to this guys business is efficient, scalable, etc. Our margins are tight, because we're outsourcing to a business.

My question is this: What would you do in my situation? Again, I have no accounting backround at all. I'm just good at marketing and sales.

A few paths I'm weighing:

1. Stay with our current white-label partner (overseas team, sub 50% margin, when industry standard margins are over 80%)
2. Hire one US bookkeeper or controller, give profit share, call him a partner and let them sit on discovery calls to help with sales (since i don't know the language) and do the fulfilment. add more as we scale.

As operators, what would you guys do in my position?

15-year CFO here. Got tired of burning 3-5 days every month on variance narratives.

So I built an LLM agent that does it in minutes. Board-ready output. Not a dashboard. Not a summary. The actual narrative my board reads.

My team now does the 20% that requires judgment — interpreting what the board needs to hear, flagging one-time vs. structural variances, connecting numbers to operational drivers. The agent handles the other 80%.

Also built:

• Multi-agent commodity intelligence

• Automated compliance scanning that runs continuously instead of quarterly

• ERP-to-AI orchestration connecting Sage/NetSuite/SAP to agent-driven workflows

Key insight that most AI vendors get wrong: finance teams don't adopt tools built by people who've never closed a quarter. The trust gap isn't about the technology. It's about who built it and whether they understand the workflow.

I designed every tool around the actual process I ran for 15 years. Not what an engineer imagined a CFO does.

The tools are open-sourced (48 repos) so it is for benefit of CFO community. No self promotion here! Happy to go deep on architecture decisions, what worked, what failed, and what I'd do differently.

We hear your complaints about people spamming the subreddit. Trust me, I’m tired of removing them and banning people. Let me know what you’d want to see as minimum requirements for engaging.

I feel very strongly that there needs to be an EXPERT/HUMAN between work produced by a junior (human or AI) and the actual client deliverable. No matter what the subject is. Tech, finance, communication etc etc. Everyone and their mother is fully capable of going to chat gee pee tee and maybe getting the right answer. The expertise of knowing what is right and WHY is more important than ever.

But I'm a tech guy. A fractional CTO. NOT a CFO. I am not the finance expert. Learned a bit while spending the last year building basically "Claude Code for accountants" in my role as VP of Product for an accounting firm.

When my client uses it, every output gets reviewed by a real accounting pro before anything ships. The accountant catches mistakes, the system logs the corrections, and over time the error rate keeps dropping. That part I feel good about.

One day the tool surfaced something that ended up saving one of my client's clients about 10% of their annual operating budget. Combine that with some understaffing on the client side, and the ask came in: would I temporarily step in as fractional CFO for that client?

I do have a finance degree. I've done a lot of startup financial modeling and business planning. I'm the only person who really understands what the tool did and didn't do. I raised the obvious "are you sure you want me, not an actual CFO?" question. They wanted me.

I'm as tired as you all are of explaining to people why they're unqualified to do your job. So I feel slightly embarrassed telling you I said yes.

The engagement went well. Client was thrilled.

But the part that's nagging me: on the bookkeeping side, the AI's work has an actual CPA reviewing every output. There IS a human-in-the-loop checkpoint. It's just not me. On the CFO side, when I was sitting in that seat, there was no equivalent rubber-stamp. The system was: me, with AI tools, making decisions that affected a real business.

I'm not sure if this is a real ethical issue or a really persistent case of imposter syndrome. Maybe both.

Should I have said no?

Two decades across MNC and mid-market companies: strategy, finance transformation, operational turnarounds, and yes, some crisis situations. These signals show up consistently, almost always months before anyone in the room is ready to call it what it is. Sharing because the current environment is bringing a lot of this to the surface.

Customer payment terms lengthening quietly. Not dramatically, just a few days each quarter. Every 15-day extension on a 20 million customer adds 830k of working capital. At current rates that is 58k per year, permanently, until someone has the commercial conversation that nobody wants to have.

Gross margin compressing quarter by quarter. Three consecutive quarters of decline is not a cycle waiting to turn. It is a structural problem that requires a decision, not a forecast revision.

Credit lines chronically above 80 percent. Banks reduce lines when they see sustained high utilisation: exactly when the company needs the capacity most. It is not punitive. It is just how credit risk works from their side of the table.

A covenant within 10 percent of its contractual threshold. In 2026 thousands of companies breached covenants with zero operational deterioration: rates tripled on the same debt and the ICR failed automatically. Most CFOs are still calculating compliance using accounting definitions rather than the contractual ones. They are not the same number.

Supplier payment deferrals becoming routine. This one almost never reaches the CFO until a key supplier suspends delivery. By then it is no longer a cash management problem.

A senior finance leader leaving. In my experience, finance professionals leave when they can see a trajectory that the rest of leadership is not yet ready to name. Their timing is usually right.

Cash runway below 45 days. Available cash plus confirmed undrawn lines, divided by average daily outflows. If you do not track this number daily, the gap in your awareness is itself a risk.

Happy to discuss any of these.

$600m FMCG. Recently did some acquisitions and now our working capital needs help. How do you analyse which metrics to use and how to chase quick wins? Seems like there are quite a few metrics related to working capital

Interesting that this comes up when interviewing for private equity companies. What's CFO's have worked in private equity and what's different about that role versus family business , public company, privately owned , etc?

Spent the last few weeks in rooms with three different CFOs at mid-to-large industrials. Different sectors, different geographies. Same conversation, almost word for word:

"I cannot tell my board what our margin looks like next quarter, because I don't know what the tariff schedule will be next month. And nobody in my organization can model it fast enough for me to make a decision before it changes again."

That's the actual problem right now. Not tariffs themselves — companies have dealt with tariffs forever. It's the cadence. Policy is changing on weekly timescales, but enterprise planning still runs on quarterly cycles. The gap is where margin goes to die.

Some numbers that have been making the rounds in finance circles:

• A 10% shift in landed cost on a single major input can swing operating margin 200–400bps for industrial manufacturers. That's a board-reportable event.
• The average S&OP cycle is 4–6 weeks. Tariff announcements are now landing inside that window, sometimes twice.
• Working capital tied up in pre-tariff buffer inventory has become a real line item in finance reviews. I've seen it called "policy hedge inventory" in one company's internal docs.
• The cost of being wrong on a single sourcing decision has gone up 5–10x compared to pre-2024 baselines because reversals are slow and expensive.

So CFOs are asking questions supply chain has never been built to answer in real time:

• If Mexico tariffs go to 25% next month, what happens to gross margin by product line?
• If China steel duties drop and Vietnam stays flat, where should we shift volume, and how fast can we actually do it?
• What's our exposure on contracts signed at current landed cost if duties move 15%?
• How much working capital is locked up in tariff-driven buffer stock, and what's the carrying cost?
• If we lose our Canadian supplier overnight, what's the 30/60/90-day P&L impact?

The honest answer in most companies right now is: we don't know, and we'll get back to you in three weeks with a deck. By then the tariff has changed twice.

This is what's driving the quiet rise of scenario-simulating supply chains. The idea isn't new — Monte Carlo, digital twins, agent-based modeling have all existed for years. What's changed is the urgency and who's funding it. It used to be a supply chain VP's pet project. Now it's a CFO line item.

A few things I'm seeing companies actually do:

1. Tariff exposure dashboards owned by FP&A, not supply chain. The data lives in supply chain systems, but the surface where the CFO interacts with it is owned by finance. This sounds like a small org change. It isn't. It's the only way the answers get used.

2. Pre-built scenario libraries. Instead of building a custom model when a tariff announcement hits, companies are pre-modeling 20–50 plausible policy scenarios in advance. When news drops, you're picking from a library, not building from scratch. Cuts response time from weeks to hours.

3. Probabilistic sourcing decisions. Instead of "we will dual-source from Vietnam," it's "we will hold optionality on three regions and shift volume dynamically based on landed cost and lead time, re-evaluated monthly." This requires contracts that didn't exist five years ago.

4. Margin-at-risk reporting alongside VaR. Treasury has been doing Value-at-Risk on FX and rates forever. Supply chain is starting to produce the equivalent for input costs. CFOs love it because it speaks their language.

5. Quarterly board reporting that includes scenario fan charts. Not point forecasts. A spread. "Here's our base case operating margin, and here's the P5–P95 band given tariff volatility." Some boards are starting to require this.

The companies that figure this out get a real edge. The ones that don't keep getting blindsided every six weeks and burning working capital on reactive buffer inventory.

Curious what folks here are seeing. A few specific questions:

• For anyone in FP&A or supply chain finance — is your CFO asking these questions, and who in the org actually owns the answer?
• Has anyone built a scenario library that actually got used in a real decision, or is it shelfware?
• For consultants / vendors — what's the realistic build vs. buy on this? Every major SCM platform claims scenario simulation now and most of it seems thin.
• And the uncomfortable one: how much of the "AI scenario planning" being sold right now is just a Monte Carlo wrapper on a forecast?

Not pitching anything, just trying to compare notes. The vendor marketing on this is so loud right now that the actual practitioner reality is hard to find.

Hi all, I am working on a project and genuinely curious what people in financial services verticals (banks, insurance, debt, lending etc) / ops / revenue roles think.

The product: an AI platform that helps financial services to scale their top-performing people into agents - the people who close loans, handle retention calls, onboard new members - so every customer gets that same quality of interaction.

Three names being considered:

• Encore AI
• Again AI
• Exceed AI

No right answer. What I'm curious about: which feels more trustworthy? More premium? More like something you'd actually engage with in a vendor conversation?

If you work in banking, lending, insurance, or revenue-side ops, your view is especially useful. Thanks.