Cash Forecasting Without a Crystal Ball: The Data Architecture Underneath
Thirteen-week cash forecasting is easy to describe and hard to do reliably. The forecast is only as good as the inputs, and most companies are building it from a disconnected AR aging report, a disconnected AP schedule, payroll data from a separate system, and whatever assumptions the controller has embedded in the Excel model. The quality of the forecast is entirely a function of the quality of the underlying data architecture.
Customer-Level Profitability: Why Most Companies Can't Calculate It
Gross margin by customer requires connecting revenue data from the CRM or billing system, cost of goods sold from operations or inventory, and allocated overhead from finance — across systems that often don't share a customer identifier. The calculation that would most directly inform go-to-market strategy is the one that most mid-market companies can't produce without a multi-day manual exercise.
The Spreadsheet That Runs Your Company: Acknowledging It, Then Replacing It
Every mid-market finance team has one. The spreadsheet that is, functionally, the system of record for something important. Usually built over years by one person who understood the business deeply. Usually a masterpiece of its kind. And usually one resignation, one corrupted file, or one formula error away from a crisis the business isn't prepared to handle.
Audit Prep Shouldn't Be a Fire Drill
When auditors arrive, most finance teams shift into detective mode — reconstructing transaction trails across systems, explaining why the GL balance doesn't exactly match the billing system, producing support documents that should have been created at the time of the transaction. A system that creates audit evidence automatically, as a byproduct of how it records transactions, makes the audit a confirmation rather than a reconstruction.
What Good Financial Reporting Actually Looks Like at Scale
P&L by segment. Department-level actuals versus plan. Cash position by entity. Customer-level margin. Most mid-market companies can produce one of these on demand. Producing all of them — accurately, in near real time, without a three-day sprint — requires an architecture most companies don't have and can't build by adding another reporting tool on top of what they already run.
Subscription Billing Is Not a Billing Problem. It's a Revenue Architecture Problem.
Chargebee, Stripe Billing, and Recurly are excellent tools for collecting recurring payments. The problem begins when someone asks 'how much revenue did we actually recognize this quarter' — and the answer lives in a spreadsheet the controller built and maintains manually. Subscription billing and revenue recognition are the same problem. Solving them in separate systems creates work that shouldn't exist.
Month-End Close Shouldn't Take Two Weeks. Here's Why It Does.
The dirty inventory of a slow close: waiting on AP to confirm outstanding bills, chasing intercompany eliminations across entities, reconciling the billing system to the GL, posting accruals for things the system didn't capture automatically, and investigating the three items that don't tie and never obviously explain themselves. Every one of those steps exists because the system didn't enforce something it should have at transaction time.
The CFO's Stack in 2025: A Realistic Audit
A CFO at a $30M company is typically managing a general ledger, a CRM, a billing platform, a contract management tool, an FP&A tool, and at least two spreadsheet models that no one else fully understands. The stack has accumulated over years of legitimate decisions, each solving a real problem. What it adds up to is a finance operation that costs more to run than it should and produces data that's less reliable than it looks.