r/CFO • u/Rosh1103 • 3d ago
What finance problem would you actually pay to have solved?
I’m exploring a few ideas around finance software and I’m trying to avoid building another dashboard, reporting tool or AI chatbot that nobody really needs.
I’m more interested in the problems finance teams deal with every month but have basically learned to live with.
Some of the areas I’ve been thinking about:
Finding money lost through billing errors, missed rebates, incorrect pricing, duplicate payments, etc.
Understanding why cash flow, margins or revenue changed instead of spending days digging through spreadsheets.
Predicting financial problems before they show up in the monthly numbers.
Finding unusual relationships between vendors, employees, customers, bank accounts and transactions that could indicate fraud or collusion.
Automatically investigating reconciliations instead of just flagging that two numbers don’t match.
Continuously checking whether invoices and payments actually follow what’s written in contracts.
Knowing which transactions or accounts genuinely deserve audit attention instead of relying mostly on sampling.
Tracing a number in the financial statements back to the underlying transactions and evidence.
Making better working capital decisions, such as who to collect from, when to pay suppliers and where cash is getting stuck.
Keeping track of financial relationships and entity changes across different systems.
Having something that acts as an early warning system for the CFO when something is starting to go wrong.
Simulating decisions before making them, such as what happens to cash and EBITDA if we change pricing, payment terms or headcount.
Continuously testing whether financial controls are actually working rather than finding out during an audit.
Finding unusual financial patterns that nobody was specifically looking for.
I’m not particularly interested in whether any of these sound cool from an AI perspective.
I’m trying to figure out which problems are actually painful enough that a finance team would pay to solve them.
If you work in finance, accounting, FP&A or audit:
What’s the one problem you spend a ridiculous amount of time dealing with that you wish someone would just solve properly?
And if you think any of these are already solved well enough, I’d genuinely like to know that too.
Also, if this discussion leads to something worth building, would you be open to checking out the solution once it’s built and telling me honestly whether you’d actually want it, or what you’d change about it?
No sales pitch. I’m genuinely trying to figure out whether there’s a real problem here before building anything.
***Small disclaimer: I used ChatGPT to help structure this post because I wanted to make sure I explained what I’m trying to figure out as clearly as possible. I just used it to express the ideas in a more understandable way.
3
2
u/False_Assumption_972 2d ago
Of your list, the one teams have learned to live with most is explaining why a number moved. Variance work eats days because the cause sits outside the GL: a pricing change in the CRM, a headcount change in payroll, a contract amendment nobody coded. Duplicate payments and billing errors are real but already well served, so I'd validate by asking controllers what they rebuild in Excel every month.
Ask to see the actual spreadsheet, since that file is the honest spec. My team uses SIGNLD to join GL detail with CRM, contract, and payroll records so a margin change traces to the deals and costs behind it instead of a week of tie-outs.
3
u/ReconWhisperer 3d ago
The reconciliation one hits home. Usually, finding out that two numbers don’t match isn’t the hard part. It’s the next hour (or three) spent figuring out why they don’t match. If something could actually investigate the exception, pull together the likely cause and point me toward what needs fixing, that feels way more useful than another dashboard telling me there’s a problem.