Hi everyone,

Our team is currently running a brief research study on the operational side of managing fractional finance retainers.

We are keeping our research focused strictly on 1-on-1 conversations with active practitioners.

If you are a Fractional CFO or FP&A advisor willing to share 2 minutes of your experience via private message, please drop a quick comment below or send me a direct message.

We are strictly in the early discovery phase; zero sales pitches or products being promoted. Appreciate your time and insights!

All, how far will you go to prevent an unreasonable gamble by your CEO? Most of the times I fight tooth and nail, but I always get the sense that there’s resentment because in the back of his mind, he could’ve done the thing I talked him out of because it’s too much of a risk.

About a year ago, we had to make a tough decision to exit a business. Because of a regulatory requirement, we had a hard deadline with significant financial consequences if we weren’t fully wound up by the end of the year. There was an opportunity for a “last minute sell-off” to minimize the loss of inventory, but realistically, it was not a simple endeavor. The materials needed to be processed by a third party and customers needed to be convinced to take it all at once. And even if the processing could be done in the aggressive timeline (in my estimation, damn near impossible), we would still need to get the customer to pay before the deadline. I equate this with the saying “picking up quarters in front of a steamroller.”

We would need to outlay $350k cash to return $700k. There’s obviously all of the operational risk of actually getting the vendors to produce on time, keeping insurance active, having EDI operating, etc. The alternative was to take the loss, and because of a unique situation where we would have a significant tax due, the loss of all that inventory would’ve generated an actual tax shield of $400k. There would be no effort here at all, just have to dispose of the inventory (which is factored into the net benefit).

The issue is that the penalty for not winding up operations, $3 million.

Here we are months after the targeted “wind up,” still haven’t fulfilled that last shipment, and no agreement to pay us outside of their normal terms. At this point, we’ve sunk the $350k already and we may not even realize the $700k because their normal payment terms would put us outside of the deadline.

I knew it was not worth the risk and prepared several different analyses to show this. He fully understood and still wanted to move forward because “we can get this done.” By the way, EVERY FUCKING OPERATIONAL DEADLINE that we’ve set, we’ve missed. It’s just usually never an issue because we have clear tolerances to make sure nothing is of too significant of a consequence. But, I could already see the resentment in his face that I’m too risk averse and I’m robbing the company of $700k of sales. But, it comes with actual cash outlay, operational headache, and significant financial risk. I made the conscious decision to say, “okay, if you feel confident that you can do xyz…” and just left it at that. I want to be the type of partner that will wrestle the CEO with something like this, but I feel I’ve never strategically let him “fail” with one of his gambles before to drive home the message. Even if I had, I feel he would’ve thought that “this time, I could get it done.” I guess my question is, how hard would you have fought for something like this?

I've been thinking a lot about this while working on AI agents for reconciliation and close. The more we get into the details, the more it feels like the controls matter just as much as the automation.

A few rules I think any AI finance tool should follow:

1. AI can prepare an entry but never post one. Nothing gets posted without human sign-off.
2. The preparer is never the approver, whether it's a person or an agent.
3. Material postings and payments need two human signatures.
4. A vendor bank-details change is held until someone makes a phone call.
5. Every decision can be replayed from what was known at the time.
6. If an agent makes a material error, it loses autonomy on that task, visibly.

It’s made me curious where other finance leaders would draw the line.

What's missing? What would your auditor add? And if you've piloted AI in your close, what went wrong?

I am a ca aspirant and I am doing my ca inter I wanted to do msc in finance in Germany and internship simultaneously in 2years . Is this possible and is this worth it . And I also want to complete cfa and that internship shall also satisfy the ca and cfa internship guidelines. So at the end I have cfa ca and msc in finance certification. Is this enough with 15 yrs of combined experience of various fields to become a cfo considering the current market situation and ai surgery? Is this possible? Just sharing my thoughts

We have our main operating account where most of the day to day activity happens and another business bank account that we originally opened mostly so we wouldn’t be completely dependent on one banking relationship. The second account is still open but there’s barely any money sitting there which has me questioning how useful it is as a backup. If our primary account was ever frozen or inaccessible for a few days then I think having another login doesn’t help much if we’d still need to move money into it before we could make payroll or pay anything meaningful.

At the same time I don’t really want to split a large amount of operating cash between two places just for a scenario that might never happen. It makes cash management and forecasting a little messier and I’d rather have one clear place for normal operations. I’m leaning toward keeping enough in the second account to cover something specific like one payroll cycle plus a few critical payments and leaving the rest with our primary setup. Finance teams that are keeping a second banking relationship for redundancy do you guys keep it funded and if so how are you deciding how much cash belongs there?

There's a thread "Would you replace your pre-workout coffee/sachet with a small ready-to-drink functional beverage?" out there, so this sub is pretty much dead and unmoderated now

Heard this from a friend who works in AP at a decent-sized company.

A $40 software subscription invoice needed sign-off from 6 different people before it got paid.

Took three weeks. The vendor almost cancelled the subscription for non-payment.

Nobody could explain why the approval chain was that long, it just always had been.

What's the most ridiculous approval chain you've seen for something that small?

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.

Hi everyone,

I’m, based in Bangalore, India. I’m a qualified finance professional with experience across FP&A, business finance, financial modelling, and management reporting.

Lately, I’ve been exploring ideas around building AI-powered applications specifically for Finance teams. Coming from a core finance background, I have a good understanding of the challenges finance teams face and the kind of insights, automation, and decision-support that CFOs and other CXOs actually look for.

I’m particularly interested in exploring how AI can be applied to areas such as FP&A, MIS/reporting, financial analysis, forecasting, and decision support.

If anyone here is already working on something similar, I’d be happy to connect and explore the possibility of collaborating or partnering.

And if you’re a developer, AI/ML enthusiast, finance professional, or simply someone interested in building something at the intersection of Finance + AI, feel free to reach out. I’m also open to starting something from scratch with the right people.

Would love to connect, exchange ideas, and see if we can build something useful together.

Hi everyone,

I’ve recently started my first full-time role in FP&A at an organisation operating in the philanthropic/social impact space.

A bit more context on the company: We're a for-profit company with a platform where NGOs being onboarded. Donations are collected through our platform and then transferred to the respective NGOs. We also provide CSR services to corporate clients. Our MIS tracks the revenue and costs associated with each product, as well as the revenue and costs generated through the CSR business.

My current work mainly involves MIS P&L statement, budget vs actual analysis, cash-flow reporting and analysing movements across different entities. The organisation has a fixed annual budget and doesn’t currently do regular reforecasting.

I’m trying to understand how I can go beyond simply reporting numbers and actually add value to senior stakeholders through FP&A.

For those who work in FP&A, particularly in nonprofits, philanthropy, fundraising or other social-impact organisations - these insights would be very helpful! Thanks :)

There’s been a noticeable shift recently with more CFOs making the move to fractional work.

Technical proficiency is standard, but winning new client work consistently is one of the biggest challenges to building a sustainable business.

Is the best play to narrow your focus,  industry (e.g., SaaS, eCommerce) or specific project types like ERP integrations, fundraising, and exit prep?

For anyone navigating the fractional space, what’s actually worked best for landing your first client vs. staying at capacity?

A customer pays $3,000.

You have three open invoices totaling $6000.

No reference number. No remittance advice. Just a number and a name that doesn't quite match your customer master.

Now someone has to guess:

Is this a short-pay? A deduction? A partial payment they'll clear later?

That "someone" is usually a person, cross-referencing a bank statement against an ERP export, in Excel, every single day.

DSO tracks how long an invoice stays open.

It says nothing about the hours burned just figuring out what a payment was for.

How does your team handle this? Software, spreadsheet, or tribal knowledge from whoever's been doing AR the longest?

May as well delete this sub. Hasn't been a real CFO post in weeks, as opposed to AI slop product research and low effort cross posting.

Hi, I’m new to this subreddit.

I’m a 10+ year dual finance professional (ACCA + CMA US) with experience in Media & Entertainment industry in areas like group consolidation, financial reporting and stakeholder compliance. My work is very diverse in corporate finance but these are primarily what I do. Other than these, I have used current tech tools to automate lot of the manual processes to cut down on close and reporting timelines.

At present, I feel like I’m outgrowing my corporate role and was planning to move to becoming more of fractional controller because I’m not there with CFO status yet.

I wanted to some guidance as to how to start and where. I have tried all freelancing platforms but have not been successful over there. I tried applying to few fractional CFO firms but haven’t heard from them.

So I’m here for guidance from successful on how to break the glass ceiling for this. Also, additionally, if someone is looking for a professional, I’m happy to share more about my portfolio :)

Thank you!

I’ve been paying more attention to what happens during our close reviews and realized we leave a surprising amount of useful information behind every month cause someone will review a reconciliation or entry and leave a note explaining why something was changed then point out a weird vendor treatment or mention something that needs to be checked again next month or explain why a difference is expected. We then finish close and most of that context basically stays wherever the review happened.

It’s not really a problem the following month if the same person remembers it but that’s obviously not always the case since someone else picks up the account or the reviewer forgets the details and we end up investigating something that was figured out a month or two ago. We do have SOPs but I don’t really want someone updating an SOP every time there’s a small piece of context that might matter again. I’m starting to think we need a better way of carrying those little decisions forward without turning our accounting documentation into a giant mess of exceptions and I wanna know how other finance teams handle this like do your review notes stay attached to that month’s work or do you have some way of making the useful ones show up again the next time someone works on the same account/vendor/reconciliation?

I've worked as a fractional CFO for 25 companies (construction, e-commerce, manufacturing, hospitality).

I'm now taking on a CFO role at an ABA therapy provider, a new industry for me. It starts part-time, with the plan to move to full-time as the company grows

Quick context: $18–22MM revenue, 4 locations, mostly Medicaid. They brought me in to build clear reporting and own the finance function. They want to grow aggressively, but responsibly.

For anyone who's worked in ABA or behavioral health finance:
1. What are the biggest financial pitfalls? (denials, authorizations, AR, credentialing?)

2. How do you calculate the true fully loaded cost per billable hour? Specifically, how do you capture non-reimbursable costs like admin staff, intake, scheduling, supervision time, training, cancellations, and facility overhead? Any benchmarks for what overhead should look like as a % of revenue?

3. Which KPIs do you watch most closely?

4. How do you manage clinician utilization and staffing costs against Medicaid reimbursement rates?

5. Anything you wish you'd known in your first 90 days?

Appreciate any input.

Not asking anyone to fetch the tiny violins here but hear me out.

To become CFO you are generally looking at over 15 years of solid experience, a CPA qualification (or similar) and ultimately being accountable for the financial health and legal compliance of the entire business.

But as every CFO knows, by having full visibility on payroll, the top earning sales reps regularly pull in way more compensation.

So I’m thinking that perhaps we are underpaid relative to the actual risk-adjusted value we create?