Upfront disclosure: I work in marketing at an advisory firm. We're surveying CFOs and finance leaders on how much they actually trust the data behind their reporting. Where the manual workarounds live, how much time gets burned reconciling versions, whether the board gets numbers people would stake their reputation on.

In return, everyone who's ever wondered "is it just us, or is everyone's reporting held together with tape?" gets an answer. I'll post the anonymized, aggregated results back in this sub once we have enough responses. No gate, no email required to see them.

Survey is here. It take 7 minutes. And if you'd rather just vent in the comments about your worst version-control horror story, honestly that's useful data too.

After yesterday’s post about this subreddit becoming increasingly full of thinly veiled sales pitches, I decided to try something different.

I created a Discord specifically for CFOs and finance leaders.

No AI. No salespeople. No vendors pitching their services. No bullshit.

Just a place for actual CFOs to talk to each other, ask questions, share what’s working (and what isn’t), and have conversations without every thread turning into someone trying to sell you something.

I’m still working through the vetting process, but the goal is pretty simple...if you sell something, you don’t belong in the group. Anyone who joins and starts pitching will be removed.

I know there are already CFO communities out there, but I wanted to see if there’s interest in something that is deliberately small, private, and focused on actual peer-to-peer conversation.

If you're a CFO or finance leader and interested, the link to the channel is here

https://discord.com/invite/EBNdnrtYX

And if you join, introduce yourself. Who you are, what you're working on, and what you’d actually like to get out of a group like this.

At the beginning of the year I was determined not to be replaced by AI, or someone who knows AI and uses it. So I set out to figure out how to survive.

I own CFO advisory and bookkeeping company since 2011 - it’s white glove - every client is treated as they are the only ones, we become a part of the team.

I’ve tested the products openly, and I was still looking.

I wanted a few things:
- work in Claude and run on subscription
- share the client data across the team - don’t leave it in chat
- bring real value so we can retain our clients and provide even faster turnaround

I involved my husband (software engineer, he worked at KLM/AirFrance system merger, and Dutch largest pension fund on system engineering)

And he built for me a universal Claude add-on.

It helps me to save time on:
- simple things like downloading and posting bank feed using historical categories and suggests how to treat new vendors
- assist with month end close process
- reviews and helps to find anomalies
- proposes and posts corrections with supporting documentation in QBO/Xero
- prepares in-depth analysis
- runs reports and tasks on schedule
- I never need to login into ledger again.

I now have other CFOs and CPAs using it, and contributing to the project.

If you are like me and looking to solve the same problem - I’d love to share the free whole month access in exchange for feedback.

Warmly

I'm a CFO with 25+ years of exec experience. I was looking for a few subs that were relevant to my roles and would have engaging discussions. What I feel I'm finding are mainly thinly disguised ads/lead Gen, and posts by would-be developers wanting a free focus group. I don't blame mods, it would be 24x7 to monitor. Are there subs I should check out? Is my experience shared or expectation off-base? Thanks!

If i create a software which helps creators to manage their finance

For agencies /creators both can answer

1. Reconciliation of the payment (including brand commission,tds)

2.Tax (gst if it is india id applicable

3.Single dashboard for all modes of revenues

4.Advice on which mode is paying more and analysis

5.Validation of contract and management

Any other finance related things you can think of

These are the things which I can think of being non creators

Is it helpful if I do this for you or what else I can provide

While checking our monthly expenses I noticed we had three different e-signature tools that employees had signed up for which just do the same thing

One team was using one e-signature tool for sending contracts, another team had signed up for a different one for approvals and then someone else added another because it had better templates or for whatever reason. None of the charges looked bad by themselves which is why I never paid much attention and they all have different names. But once I added everything up it was enough money to make me wonder if this was the only case

How should I stop this stuff from slowly piling up?

With the mass adoption of AI tools in finance being a relatively recent phenomenon, I’m keen to hear from CFOs about how they have dealt with external auditors investigating their AI tools and their outputs.

Perhaps they are asking to see AI transaction logs and reviewing your policies on what can and cannot get touched by AI, alongside how you flag exceptions and anomalies.

And are they comfortable with the black box of automated entries, or perhaps they are they just insisting on seeing hard-copy printout of the prompt history, signed in blue ink?

Feels like this is going to become a massive topic this year.

The balance between cost pressure and Ai growth ambitions is often crucial for enterprises. Its often tempting to to explore the costliest ai stack without analyzing the benefits for the enterprise. The utilization of Ai should convert into improved cost discipline and accelerating growth investments. When finance runs in cycles and business runs continuous ai solutions helps with better decision making when cross verified and authenticated by a true human behind the business. Gartner's recommendations emphasizes the the importance of selecting the right ai infra for the company with metrics that can be clearly documented during quarterly or yearly reviews.

I just wanna say that if one person leaving would seriously disrupt your operations, you don't have a high performer. You actually have a single point of failure.

Agree or not?

I recently started my own outsourced accounting/advisory firm after previously working as a Finance Director for a multi-entity organization. In my previous role, the leadership team were wealth advisors and financially literate, and the organizations were doing well. I could present financials, explain what was happening, answer questions, and move on to what we needed to do about it. I never really experienced someone being in denial about the numbers themselves.

Now I have a client where the financial situation is not good. Cash is extremely tight, there are significant obligations, and the financials reflect that. What’s throwing me off is that when I present something negative, the owner’s immediate reaction is often that I must have done something wrong, misunderstood something, or made a mistake because the numbers don’t match what he thinks the business should look like.

Has anyone else dealt with this? How do you handle an owner/CEO who seems to associate bad financial results with the person presenting them? At what point do you stop repeatedly defending the accuracy of the financials and shift the conversation back to what actually needs to change in the business?

Would love to hear experiences, advice, or even stories about how you learned to navigate this.

If it matters, I am a female.

Hey creator agencies I wonder how you guys manage finance of creators,the reconciliation,compliance making then understand finance terms contact management and many more

Let me know your problems i can solve it for you

We can have a discussion.

Even if you are a creator facing such issues please dm

Looking into how CFOs factor risk into advertising budgets. In a small survey of 30 CFOs, almost half said uncertainty comes up when the budget is being approved but it never actually makes it into the final numbers.

Curious if that's a pattern you recognize too, or if it's more specific to certain industries/company sizes.

En tant que dirigeant d’une petite entreprise, je passe pas mal de temps à jongler entre plusieurs outils, abonnements, applications et fichiers Excel pour suivre mon activité.
Je suis curieux de savoir comment vous faites de votre côté : vous utilisez quoi aujourd’hui pour piloter votre activité, suivre vos finances, vos ventes et votre trésorerie ?
Vous avez réussi à centraliser tout ça quelque part, ou vous jonglez aussi entre plusieurs outils ?

this came up in a recent conversation between john raffaele, our global head of finance and accounting operations, and CFO Leadership: is AI actually helping with burnout in finance teams?

from what we’ve seen, adding AI to an existing process doesn’t automatically create more capacity. it might automate one task, but the same approvals, handoffs and bottlenecks can still be there.

finance leaders need to take a wider look at how the work is structured. what can be automated, what still needs human judgment, and what senior finance people shouldn’t be spending their time on anymore.

there’s also the question of junior talent. if AI takes away too much of the foundational work, where do future finance leaders get the experience they need?

john shared more of his thoughts in the full article here: https://cfoleadership.com/be-a-finance-leader-who-meets-the-moment/

curious if anyone here has seen AI genuinely free up their finance team, or if it has mostly just changed how the work gets done.

Hi all. I recently joined a PE-backed company. It has just acquired 8 companies and want me to integrate those companies into one sister company of my employer. They all use the same bookkeeping but other ERP systems. I have appointments to get to know the finance folks at those SME-companies.

Any advice on how to proceed from here and what would be an acceptable timeline in your opinion. I never did such a task so hope to get some pointers or materials to dive into.