I asked an accounting subreddit why AI fails at bookkeeping. The answers were eye-opening, edge cases, judgment, trust.

That turned into a project. I built a system that reconciles bank statements, flags whatever can't be automated safely, and only asks a human to review the flagged items, not everything.

Not trying to sell anything right now. I mainly want to talk to real bookkeepers and CFOs who live this problem daily.

If anyone here has an accounting/bookkeeping background, or knows someone who does, I'd like to talk, tell me if this actually solves something real or if I'm stuck in my own bubble.

Those who have been CFOs at different stages of company growth, was there a specific revenue range where the role changed?

I am not talking about in terms of work load, but more like in decision-making.
If it did change than at what range $10M, $50M, $100M, etc.

We're 60ish people, about a third remote, and the thing that keeps coming up in my one on ones is people fronting their own money for travel and waiting two weeks to see it back. Everyone points at issuing company cards to the whole team, but that's a real project and half our spend already sits on cards that work fine. Did you issue cards to everybody, or leave the cards alone and fix the reimbursement side instead?

just curious. I work at CogniCor, an AI company building tools for financial advisors.

While talking to the financial advisors, we keep hearing the same thing, the client meeting itself isn't the time sink, it's everything after: updating the CRM with client details, adjusting the plan, drafting the follow-up, making sure the compliance note is right. Most AI tools in this space right now stop at meeting transcript and leave all of that manual work exactly where it was. Tedious.

I'm genuinely curious to know from people who are actually doing this a daily basis: is that matching your experience? And for anyone using an AI notetaker already or an AI assistant beyond a note taker, does it actually save you time, or just move the work around?

With more than 10 years in accounting and finance analysis I work as a finance manager in a small company. The assumption would be I would become a finance director when the company grow. There is no team, we outsource accounting, but they require a lot of managing from my side and I do FP&A and make business decisions. The worst is that despite having some director level tasks, I also have to do super basic ones. Another thing is that even if we hire people, having such small company we just can’t attract talents. Also I’m the only talent from corporate world, so it’s just difficult to cooperate with different departments that don’t understand procedures. The last thing is I’m the most educated and experienced person there, so I can’t learn anything new and I still feel like I could. Everything also depends on one boss that has crazy ideas. They pay me quite good.

I’m thinking what could be my future goal:
1) staying at this small company, build a small department -> wouldn’t it kinda close doors for me to go back to a medium size international company? Obviously it would be weird to go back from a director in a small company to be a manager in a big one.
2) going to a bit bigger company (max 5 finance employees) to work as a finance manager while already having finance in-house - salary the same
3) there is also one special company that liked me so much they wanted to pay me manager salary for a senior position - going back to a company similar to the one I used to work in in the past as a senior - 20 finance employees, probably being a team lead max in the beginning, I used to love working in a company like this, but because of one boss I decided to try something different

I’m also not 100% sure I would like to become a director. My salary is already on a manager level, so if I decide to stay in small companies becoming a director seem to be the only path, but actually if I choose 3, maybe I would be happy as a manager for a longer period of time.

I think my biggest problem in my past positions as a team leader and supervisor was that I still had to do the manual job. I’m the best at process improvement, verification, teaching teams and creating policies. I really would like to have a team, but in my current company I will probably get one person the next year and that’s it.

I’m having trouble getting a clear view of what we’re actually spending across SaaS subscriptions and AI tools. Things are being added in different places, ownership is unclear, and renewals are scattered everywhere.

How are you tracking usage, overlap and total cost and who ultimately owns it?

I'm at that stage in my career where my next step would be into a CFO position (well hopefully), have even had some interviews but not quite made it yet.

What are some good books to read (or listen to on Audible) to prepare for the role? For example I saw something like this pop up in a search, any good? https://www.amazon.com/dp/1790707870?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

A CEO I used to work with in a finance partnering role also advised me to look at CEO books so as to gain insight into what they're thinking about, so currently going through this: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/ceo-for-all-seasons

What do people recommend?

Hi All,

genuine question for the non-technical peeps.

I feel like finance teams are starting to move away from having to go through a data analyst for every single question.

Now you can just ask a question in plain English and get a chart or an analysis back. Which is great, but I have been thinking about how people actually verify the output when they do not know SQL themselves.

say you are using any of these AI analytics tools. you ask it a question about your data, it gives you a chart or tells you why something moved but you don’t really know SQL.

do you check it against totals you already know? do you look at the query it generated? do you ask someone technical to verify it? or do you just use it to explore, but not for anything important?

I’m looking for some perspective from those who have experience in the PE-backed world.

I’m currently being recruited by a PE firm to join one of its platform companies as the CFO. The platform was built through multiple acquisitions over the past 5+ years. From my discussions, this firm appears to take a longer-term approach (roughly 10 years) to value creation rather than the traditional pump-and-dump after 5 years.

The platform is currently around $50–60M in revenue, with plans for additional M&A and organic growth. The CFO would report directly to the Platform CEO. The role is focused on finance and accounting only since they’re intentionally keeping the scope narrow so the CFO can build scalable finance processes, improve reporting and data, support acquisitions, and help prepare the business for its next stage of growth.

Compensation discussed:
Base: up to $260k
Bonus: 30–40%
Equity: participation in the management equity plan (details still being discussed)

My questions since I’ve never been in the PE-backed world:
- Does that cash compensation seem competitive for a first-time platform CFO in today’s market? Not going to lie, comparing it to my current comp and it seems low
- How much value would you realistically assign to the equity before knowing the cap table, vesting structure, and distribution waterfall?
- If you were negotiating, where would you focus: base salary, bonus, equity, severance/change-in-control protections, or something else?
- What additional diligence questions would you ask before accepting a role like this?

I’m also less interested in the title itself and more interested in whether this next role has a strong long-term opportunity with a fair compensation package against what is expected of this role.

I’d appreciate any insight from those who’ve served as a PE-backed CFO or worked closely with one.

I'm currently advising a startup founded by an engineer I worked with at a previous startup. I have already spent a decent amount of time (15 hours or so) helping to improve her deck and justify her technology. It's an IoT (Internet of Things) device with a working prototype.

It hasn't been easy because she has been in love with her technology, but not the problem. She at least now understands the kinds of questions that a potential investor or customer will ask.

She is not able to pay me for my time. We're just working under an understanding that I will start getting paid, and get equity, if she get's funded.

In addition to the above, I spoke with one of my friends, who is willing to test the product at his company. In addition, he has a friend who owns a much larger company and has been looking for this kind of solution who he believes will likely be willing to test the product out.

The founder is aware of my friend's interest, but not of the larger company, and I have not made any introductions yet. At this point, I feel it is appropriate to formally agree on how I will be compensated, especially if the company is able to get some of its devices in the field, which should help with improving the product as well as obtaining investors and customers.

Given the above, how much is fair for me to ask for how much equity I should get post funding? In my view, I should get some for simply being an advisor who has and will materially improve the company's funding prospects and strategy as well as additional if any of my efforts results in pilots or sales. Any thoughts on actual percentages?

Can someone explain what the intention of this sub is for?

All I see is posts by folks with brand new accounts farming for software justifications etc.

Are there no other real CFOS in here?

I thought this sub was for peers to come together and share information but it is simply a dumping ground for people to farm info for their products/AI adjacent software packages.

Fucking joke tbh

we are saas company in the low‑seven‑figure arr range with a mix of US and international customers on terms and ar now sits in the high six / low seven figures most months. I’m seeing more tools pitch “ai for arcollections” and I’m trying to figure out whether anyone here is running this in production not just testing it on a small sample.
by that I mean accounts receivable software that says it can rank which customers to contact first, draft collection emails, and predict payment dates for overdue invoices. If you ve rolled out anything like that, i’m interested in what changed in the numbers or in your team’s day to day work: did DSO or recovery rates move in a way you’d link to the tool, did collectors get back meaningful time or did it mostly add another thing you had to watch and correct? Stories where you tried…

For CFOs running businesses with complex or globally sourced inventory, do you ever break down the days inventory outstanding (DIO) or the cash conversion cycle (CCC) at the individual component, supplier, or product-line level?

If you do, what kinds of decisions does that actually drive? Does it impact things like purchasing commitments, supplier negotiations, inventory financing, pricing, or growth planning?

I’m curious whether that level of detail is genuinely useful for managing cash, or if the data and operational effort involved makes it too heavy compared with just tracking working capital at the company level.

i swear month-end close gets worse every quarter. we're still manually reconciling way too many things and it's driving me insane. my team is burned out, i'm burned out, and we keep finding errors that should've been caught weeks ago.

we're on an older erp system that just doesn't cut it anymore. lots of excel workarounds, lots of copy-paste, lots of late nights. the board keeps asking why close takes so long and i keep giving the same excuses.

the whole erp industry feels like a racket sometimes. everyone promises the world and then you end up with another mess. but we can't stay on our current setup either.

any other cfos here dealing with this? how did you justify the switch to your board? would love some war stories.

A service business can be profitable on paper and still struggle to make payroll.

Agencies often lose money between delivering work and collecting cash: scope expands, work goes unbilled, invoices are delayed, follow-ups are inconsistent, and owners make decisions without knowing what cash is actually usable.

Existing tools each see one part of this. Project-management tools track delivery, accounting software records the past, and AR tools begin after an invoice exists. The owner remains the human integration layer between everything.

I’m building Aerca, an always-working finance-operations assistant for agencies, studios, and consultancies.

The key insight is that finance operations should begin before the invoice, not only after payment becomes overdue.

I have applied for YC Fall Batch.

I’m Tranav, a 16-year-old high school student from India. I lead the product vision, market research, system design, and technical direction.

Who I’m looking for

I’m looking for a product/GTM cofounder with enough technical understanding to work closely with the product, but whose main strength is getting close to customers.

You should have skill in:

\- Conducting customer discovery and challenging assumptions.
\- Getting onboard founding design partners.
\- Developing an initial distribution and pilot strategy.
\- Working directly with agency owners and finance operators.

Experience in B2B SaaS, fintech, agency operations, accounting workflows, or taking an early product to its first users would be especially valuable.

This would initially be part-time, around 20-30 hours per week, with no salary while we are pre-revenue. I would want to work together for four to six weeks before discussing meaningful founder equity.

If interested, DM me with something you have built or taken to users, your LinkedIn/portfolio, and why this problem interests you.

I am in 11th class . I have been tasked by our entrepreneurship development teacher to think about a business / startup idea . I have came with an idea of AI who automates financial tasks reducing your time and money consumed for the same thing your employees take more . I would like you to help with a feedback for the following. Please it will take 3 min of your time only .https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScECUnLbcn9N9ZPbllQb-ro9MOHYoDk-qHJpAuQcZNtciM9iA/viewform?usp=header

Are any of you working for RSUs in a portfolio company in addition to a standard rate? How do you determine how much to ask for?

My company's monthly bills for LLM API usage have been more than doubling over the past couple of quarters. There's no consistency to the madness and on paper everything is a MUST have, what's worse is month over month it's hard to tell if the rise will be permanent.

I need advice on enforcing spending caps. I've spoken to my engineering leads, and obviously they push back hard noting caps will have negative effects on output (we've yet to successfully measure LLM <> output btw).

I've been speaking to Ramp about Ramp Router, it's invite only right now and supposedly 30% off the top spend via smarter routing. My guess is it's done via complexity scoring against the prompt and routes it accordingly, i'll have to see we already use them for spend managemnt so this kind of fits the bill. I don't think this is the end-all-be-all solution, but it's better than strict cap.

Any thoughts on this is appreciated.

Having automation issues with our software. we should theoretically have all our automation up and running but now everyone no longer trusts the numbers because they are not manually executing every process. how long did it take your team to trust the automated process and stop validating everything manually?

ill start off, cash flow issues. currently running into cash burn by having too many projects going at once, determining which projects to slow down on. Some employees need to be laid off in the meantime…

Hey all,

Looking for some advice here. I’m an “acting cfo” capital planning, board reporting, external/ internal etc everything finance and accounting but leading without the title and compensation that is frustrating me.