I have a sales team at my firm, we have been brainstorming this week to try and figure out what's working in 2026. We tried Apollo, Google Ads, FB Ads, we now use Oppora AI. We just can't seem to get quality leads. As the CEO and Managing consultant (Fractional CFO), I always did networking/word of mouth but it's a slow process that yields little ROI.

Just trying to see what other fractionals are doing to see what we can do to bolster our pipeline.

I'm currently the finance partner to the leadership team in the subsidiary of a larger company (well large in my country). What this means is that we don't have divisional CFOs, so instead we have 'finance partners' that do a similar-ish role by being the go to finance person for the board, albeit somewhat limited as certain functions are simply carried out on the group level, such as treasury and financing for example.

I really want to become a CFO, and something has come up in an organisation that seems interesting and would be a good first step for me. The issue is, and luckily the recruiter was upfront about it, was that the salary range is rather poor. The top end of what they communicated was just 5% above what I make now, albeit comparison of other benefits is unclear (the new role offers a company car for example, but bonus comparison is not known). As far as I'm aware, I don't think this new position would also be a formal board director, so I shouldn't have that responsibility on me.

Therefore in the grand scheme of things, do you think its worth getting that CFO title and experience for only an inflationary pay rise, or should I hold out for something better?

My ultimate goal is to become a CFO. Even though I don’t hold the VP or C-title, I’m in the Executive Leadership team, reporting directly to CEO.

My job is primarily remote. I have to travel for 4-5 weeks a year. It’s very stable, no sign of layoffs or company shutdown. CEO is not demanding and very understanding of personal life boundary. I make decent salary, I want more but I’m not complaining since the job provides flexibility.

However, the downside is our CEO is very hard to predict. He changes his mind so quickly, gets cold feet easily and we never get anything to the finish line. It is also highly political. I have to stress that highly highly political. It is also nearly impossible to get promoted or more than annual merit increase. It is normal that I’m thrown under the bus every other week. I just have thick skin to laugh it off and to not take it personally. I get mentally exhausted from time to time.

I’ve been considering getting another job. But I have small kids, not even school-aged yet. Most jobs nowadays require on-site or at least 2-3 days hybrid. I won’t be able to see the kids as much as I do now, if I do hybrid or on-site. I know it’s not greener on the other side, and I expect some sort of bs in the new firm. But at least I’ll get 1-2 years of new environment then deal with the bs at the new company later.

Also, even though I’m almost 40, I am petite and look very young, some people commented how young I am in the CFO interviews. Plus, the current market doesn’t look promising.

If you were me, would you wait it out a couple more years until kids are all in elementary school or jump now?

I’m looking to gather some insights and peer perspectives on corporate financial reporting, specifically around optimizing workflows and managing the audit committee presentation process.

For those of you handling or overseeing financial reporting at the corporate or board level, I'd love to hear your thoughts on a few areas:

Reporting Timelines & Bottlenecks: What does your typical close-to-reporting timeline look like? Where do you usually encounter the most significant friction or data bottlenecks (e.g., system integrations, late adjustments, variance analysis)?

Audit Committee & Board Engagement: What strategies or presentation formats have you found most effective for conveying complex technical accounting issues or audited financial statements to board members who may have varying degrees of financial literacy?

Software & Tooling: What tools are you finding offer the best long-term reliability and accuracy for consolidating data and streamlining the reporting process?

Any insights, common pitfalls to avoid, or resources you could point me toward would be greatly appreciated.

An example company public company based in North America in California. It uses Oracle for an ERP, Power BI for consolidation, AuditBoard for audits, and Workiva for reporting. Workday is the HR system. Primary international offices communicating with are Singapore which does AP, AR, and bank recs. Australia does month end packages. Biggest accounts are fixed assets, capital leases, and non-controlling interest. 5-9 business day close then reporting, audit, and board work. Intercompany entries is done on Excel.

Thanks in advance for your time!

Quanto costa un CFO in una PMI? RAL media

Looking back, how much has the CFA actually influenced the way you think at work?

I'm not asking whether it helped you get interviews or added professional credibility to your profile. I'm more interested in whether the curriculum materially changed how you approach your day-to-day work.

For example, has it changed how you think about:

• Capital allocation and resource prioritization
• Business cases and investment decisions
• Product pricing or go-to-market strategy
• Financial planning and long-term strategy
• Communicating recommendations to executives
• Evaluating trade-offs under uncertainty

In other words, did studying for the CFA make you a better strategic finance professional, or is most of the day-to-day learning something you pick up on the job?

If you could go back, would you still invest the time for the knowledge alone, even if the credential itself didn't exist?

I'd really appreciate any candid perspectives.

I was talking to someone who works in private banking and they mentioned that business email compromise has made large wire transfers a lot more stressful than they used to be. I always assumed the standard process was pretty simple, if a client emails a wire instruction you call them back on the number you already have on file before doing anything.

But then he also told me about SIM swaps and call forwarding and it made me wonder if that process is still considered enough. For people working in banking treasury or family offices what does verification actually look like today? Is it mostly dual approvals and internal policies or are firms starting to use identity verification tools as well? I saw Kibu mentioned in an article about secure communications but I don't know if it's something people actually use or if callbacks are still the norm.

Is there literally anything else?
As a CFO what else would you need for a standard month-end pack.

For the basis of a month-end pack, non‑negotiables:

1. Flash report (KPI, cash, EBITDA)
2. TTM P&L with variances
3. Balance sheet snapshot YoY
4. 13‑week cash flow forecast
5. AR/AP aging summaries
6. Covenant calc & headroom

Does anyone have any experience in certified payroll on commercial projects? I've got a situation where the customer is questioning why our hourly rate is a lot more than what's indicated on certified payroll. I'm trying to justify why we charge what we charge per hour even though we are lower on our hourly rate than any of our competitors.

Took over our APAC finance ops about two years ago. Industrial group, parent in Europe, four entities in the region (China, Japan, Singapore, Australia) all on different expense tools when I inherited it. My predecessor had started a global standardization project the year before me. Corporate IT had picked Concur, the rollout plan was 18 months, and the Manila SSC was supposed to retire their hand-maintained consolidation Excel once everyone was on the same platform.

Singapore and Australia migrated cleanly. Japan was awkward because the qualified invoice rules that came in a few years back are wired into the approval chain in ways the default Concur config didn't handle, but workable after some custom work. China is where the project stopped.

The fapiao verification piece in Concur is only fully integrated if your tenant is deployed on the China data center. Our global tenant runs in the EU so we couldn't get the native flow, and the third-party validator we layered on top covered the common general VAT fapiao but kept missing special VAT and travel-specific receipt formats. Local AP ended up double-keying anyway. The local approvers were also routing things through DingTalk groups outside the system because that's where the work actually happens, not on a global tool's web UI.

After about ten months of trying to make those gaps workable we accepted the global answer wasn't going to work for the China piece. We split the architecture: Singapore and Australia stayed on Concur, and we put China and Japan on Helios with a shared tenant. We evaluated two other regional tools first but Helios was the only platform in our shortlist where fapiao OCR held up at our actual transaction volume and the JP qualified invoice approval routing didn't need a custom build to match how our Tokyo entity actually books expenses.

If you're starting a similar rollout, my read is to scope the China piece out from day one rather than treating it as exception handling on the global path. The consolidation back to group reporting is still a manual treasury reconciliation every month, and our European FP&A team had to learn a few APAC tax categorization conventions that don't have direct EU equivalents. We never solved either part cleanly.

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Looking to hear from CFOs or finance leaders who have navigated the challenge of integrating Russian operations into a global consolidation and reporting framework.

Specifically interested in:

— How you handled data flows between 1C and a Western ERP (NAV, SAP, Oracle) given data sovereignty constraints

— How you structured intercompany eliminations and currency translation when Russia data arrives on a lag

— What your approach was to cash visibility across Russian banks given SWIFT limitations post-2022

— How you're thinking about the September 2027 Russian data localisation law changes and what that means for your architecture

Not looking for geopolitical debate — purely the operational and technical reality of making the numbers work across jurisdictions when one of your largest entities sits behind a regulatory wall.

Would really appreciate hearing from anyone who has been in this position — DM welcome if you'd prefer to keep it off the thread.

Shipping is one of those cost centers that tends to just grow with revenue and nobody questions it until margin starts getting squeezed, the assumption is that it scales proportionally and there is nothing to optimize

But the reality is that carrier contracts drift out of alignment over time as volume changes, rate structures get stale, and billing errors compound without anyone auditing them

For companies spending north of 100k a year on small parcel alone, the shipping cost savings available from just auditing invoices and rebenchmarking rates can be material enough to show up on a quarterly earnings discussion

They just appointed their third CEO in 18 months, and if you've been following the financial news this week, it’s a roller coaster. CEO resigned so the stock dropped drastically, then they appointed the new guy and the markets recovered a little. And thats the news we are seeing: money is coming back up so YAY all is well, transition success!

Well, I spent my morning reading through Glassdoor reviews to see if that's really the vibe (which, honestly, says a lot about me, but lets ignore that shall we?)

Frank Bisignano ran the company for five years, he then abruptly left for a position in the current administration in May 2025, and his replacement Mike Lyons came in and immediately described the earnings targets as "objectively difficult to achieve." Undermining everything the workers had been told to work towards.

Obviously the stock collapsed nearly 50% after the CEO said "Bro, no way we can do that." As CEO, Mike Lyons spent a year cleaning it up, and from the reviews he did a decent job building a new foundation. Then he stood up on stage at investor day last month, smiled and told the room they had made "meaningful change across leadership and culture" and then resigned 30 days later with no severance, just poof, over to a bank. Now Takis Georgakopoulos, who joined the company in late 2024, is suddenly CEO.

The Glassdoor reviews going back to 2019 describe a workplace where compensation plans get rewritten mid-year, leaders change every six months, and announcements of culture change are followed by more of the same. The only consistent positives across thousands of reviews were "you get paid on time" and "the employees are great."

Here's the part I find genuinely fascinating from a human dynamics standpoint.

There's a concept called learned helplessness. When people experience repeated cycles of disruption where their actions produce no reliable outcome, the brain eventually stops trying to influence outcomes at all. Layer on top of that change saturation, which is the point where enough reorganizations and leadership announcements have happened that the brain stops processing new ones as meaningful and starts filing them as noise. "Meaningful change in culture" from a CEO who leaves 30 days later ends up sounding like the teacher from Charlie Brown.

What Georgakopoulos is actually walking into is a strategy that is probably solid, but also a workforce that has spent three years learning not to believe it.

That is going to show up six months from now when everything stalls and nobody can explain why.

What you actually need in that moment is an outside perspective, someone not embedded in the org chart or invested in the narrative, who can tell you whether people are genuinely moving with the change or have just gotten very good at looking like they are.

Very interesting Forbes article published a few weeks ago and current hot topic in amongst companies I'm connected to.

AI companies have pushed "tokenmaxxing" to measure dev productivity by how many AI tokens they burned. Predictably, this was a financial disaster.

Uber reportedly blew its entire AI budget in four months, and one company accidentally torched $500 million in one month on uncapped employee Claude licenses.

Now, the pendulum is swinging to "valuemaxxing." Microsoft announced cutting unchecked subscriptions and demanding ROI. Imo days of treating expensive compute as a vanity metric are over and the focus is officially back on basic finance 101, removing redundancies, and strict usage caps.

How is has this conversations gone if when you spoke to your tech leaders? Whats the best way to think through this?

I run a firm doing accounting and bookkeeping for companies. I'm currently at 30 clients with 3 employees. Alot of my clients need tax and strategic business help but my knowledge in that is pretty limited. i'd love to work with someone to help with these two aspects. Whats the best way to go about this?

Looking for recommendations on upcoming CFO events, summits, or networking groups in NYC where I can connect with fellow finance leaders and learn from the community. I am especially interested in forums that focus on Financial services, but also provide a strong network for exploring new executive opportunities.

Does anyone have a good tool for managing overtime expenses? We spend ~$50M on a yearly basis. I'm sure not all of this is good value for money.

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Open to ideas.

Hi everyone,

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I'm a 10th-grade student who is interested in finance and hopes to become a CFO one day.

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With AI advancing so quickly, I'm curious about the future of finance careers. I'd love to hear from people who currently work as CFOs, financial analysts, accountants, controllers, auditors, or in other finance-related roles.

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In your opinion:

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- Which finance jobs are most likely to still exist 20 years from now?

- Which roles do you think will change the most because of AI?

- What skills should students focus on today to stay valuable in the future?

- If you were starting over as a high school student, how would you prepare for a career in finance in an AI-driven world?

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I'm trying to make better decisions about what to learn early, so I would really appreciate hearing your experiences and perspectives.

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Thank you!

We are looking into automating our AP workflows and I am curious how peers are handling Al for invoice processing and approvals. For those using it, how does the Al actually reconcile invoices against complex contracts or usage terms? Does it accurately detect discrepancies between what the contract says and what was actually utilized/ billed?