Category: The Accidental CFO
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The Accidental CFO – Automating a Mess Just Gives You a Faster Mess
Stories and lessons from an unexpected journey in finance. Every finance leader is feeling the pressure from their CEO or board to “implement AI.” The rush is on to buy the shiniest new FP&A copilot and let the algorithms take over the month-end close. But here is the dirty little secret the software vendors won’t…
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The Accidental CFO – Why You Can’t Outgrow a Broken Balance Sheet
Stories and lessons from an unexpected journey in finance. For a decade, the business world operated in a financial hallucination. We applauded companies for buying a dollar of revenue for $1.50 and enthusiastically called it “capturing market share.” When money was virtually free, top-line growth could paper over almost any operational disaster. Today, the bill…
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The Accidental CFO – The Language Barrier: Translating Margin to the Sales Team
Stories and lessons from an unexpected journey in finance. You can send your VP of Sales a dozen variance reports, but until you learn to speak their language, your margins are going to keep bleeding. In most growing companies, Finance and Sales operate in completely different realities. Finance speaks in gross margin percentages, GL codes,…
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The Accidental CFO – The “Hero” Trap: Why Brute-Force Finance is a Liability
Stories and lessons from an unexpected journey in finance. I see it all the time. A finance team pulls three all-nighters in a row to close the month-end books, or they spend an entire weekend manually reconciling messy ERP data for a Monday board meeting. The CFO sends a company-wide email praising their “unmatched dedication”…
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The Accidental CFO – The Apprenticeship Gap: If AI Does the Grunt Work, How Do We Train Future CFOs?
Stories and lessons from an unexpected journey in finance. Finance leaders are thrilled AI can consolidate messy ERP exports in seconds. The narrative is everywhere: “Let AI handle the grunt work so junior analysts can be strategic!” It sounds like a perfect ROI. But it ignores a fundamental truth of how finance professionals actually develop. By…
inersec 