Been a while since I reintroduced myself. I write about CFO craft under The Secret CFO pseudonym. Initially, that pseudonym gave me the freedom to talk about the CFO world in a way I never could with my name and company attached... and I guess it just stuck. - Path: Big 4 → FP&A → Controller → Corp Dev → CFO (+ a few detours since) - Experience: 25 years in finance, more than half of those in CFO roles - Scale: Last CFO role as Group CFO in a $4bn revenue business - Specialism: Special situations. High leverage, complex balance sheets, operational turnarounds and refinancings - Transactions: 20+ M&A deals, integrations, exits, and major transformations - Industries: Mature, 'real-world' businesses. Manufacturing, agriculture, hospitality, CPG, retail. Thin margins, operational complexity, high stakes. A couple of years ago, I stepped away from the CFO seat for what I thought would be a year or so break. I had 20 years’ worth of handwritten notebooks full of things I’d learned, mistakes I’d made, frameworks I’d built, and lessons I wished somebody had taught me earlier. So I started writing them up and sharing them through my email newsletter. As Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.” The more I wrote up, the more I shared. The more I shared, the more my platform grew. And along the way I discovered I really love codifying and then teaching this stuff. I’d always enjoyed developing people in the teams I built. But suddenly, I could do it, at scale, for people I had never even met. I started getting unsolicited emails from people who had landed their first public-company CFO job, completed a PE exit, escaped a boardroom bear trap, or simply made a better capital decision helped by one of the Playbooks I have written. It humbles me every time. And it's addictive... I’ve now written more than 500,000 words about the craft of being a CFO. Some came straight from those old notebooks. Some emerged from trying to make sense of a career’s worth of experience. And plenty has come from what I continue to learn from the incredible finance leaders I talk to everyday. So, that’s why I’m here... To codify the craft of finance leadership. To challenge and improve the fundamental ideas. And to put that context into the hands of the humans and machines building the finance function of the next decade. It's an honor, thanks for following along.

Let's talk about the much fabled zero-day / continuous close for finance teams. Today, a three-day month-end close is absolutely world class. In a complex organization, getting there can take years of transformation work, flawless systems and processes, not to mention phenomenal talent and discipline. And even then... Three days is still a long lag for numbers on something that’s already happened. So two things can be true at once: 1. Closing the books quickly is incredibly difficult to do well. 2. No matter how fast we do it, it is still unacceptably slow. Why? Strip accounting right back and every core transaction cycle starts with an economic event. Finance’s job is turning that event into something accountable and reportable. - First comes the core transaction record: who, what, how much, and when? - Then comes attribution and timing: which entity, cost center, project, or product? CapEx or OpEx? Which period? What was it actually for? - And finally comes repair and reporting: accruals, reclasses, allocations, reconciliations, true-ups, manual journals, and mappings into management reporting. The further the transaction travels without carrying the right accounting and metadata with it, the more work explodes around it. Which leads to... the Cone of Accounting Bullshit. A single economic event can be estimated, accrued, reversed, coded, reclassified, allocated, and remapped half a dozen times before it becomes useful information. Meanwhile, if we’d captured the accounting, timing, and metadata properly at source, we could have got it right once and left the bloody thing alone. The zero-day close will belong to those who invest in upstream technology and process innovation that starves the cone of accounting bullshit of the oxygen it needs to grow. I wrote more about this here: cfosecrets.io/p/is-double-en…

Bot replies a huge problem again …

I wrote this piece in response to the claim from @eglyman that it was time to 'retire double-entry bookkeeping'.

Yeah that’s right… I’m a ‘rebel’ 😎

For those of you who wanna sell your business one day, I wrote a book about it Link in comments LFG!

It is almost Wednesday, my dudes

I’ve got a special edition dropping this week. I’ve been spending time behind the scenes with the Ramp team ahead of a pretty big week for them. And Ramp Co-founder and Co-CEO Eric Glyman came out swinging against an opponent with a long undefeated streak… Who? You’ll have to wait until Wednesday ... all revealed in a Ramp x Secret CFO exclusive. Sign up to my newsletter to get it direct to your inbox (link in my profile)

It’s a lot harder to do reliably than the Twitter threads and LinkedIn posts would have you believe. For smaller single person workflows it’s easy enough (which most of that content is built on) For anything with any workflow complexity it’s more about buying the right AI native tools designed to manage and put guardrails around the quirks of the process. @Meet_campfire as an ERP and @tryramp for spend management will get you a lot of the way there for most companies. Once you have accounting working well then you can start bolting on other functionality on top, but start at the core.

I co-founded Opendoor ($10B+ rev). Today, I’m launching Summation. We raised $35M from Benchmark & Kleiner Perkins to build an AI analyst you can trust. Here’s where Claude and ChatGPT fall short: 🧵

"Hey Dario, congrats again on the great quarter. Nice to see the Enterprise re-acceleration. Hoping you could provide a little color on that 10% extinction # and some of the puts and takes that might have on further enterprise adoption. And then just a quick follow-up after"

🚨 ANNOUNCEMENT 🚨 After a break from regular programming in August, I'm back with a new series of The Secret CFO's Playbook in September starting tomorrow. And the series is: Inheriting a Shitshow Finance Function Look ... I know it's not for everyone, but I've always loved fixing things. It didn't take long for my finance career to point towards the finance roles that had the most 'hair' on them. Team rebuilds, broken systems, reporting integrity issues, weak insight and business partnering. Those are the kind of problems I love to fix... root and branch Too often I see finance leaders get caught holding a cup of someone else's cold sick and wondering: a) what happened to that nice sounding CFO role they read about on the recruiters' candidate profile b) do they still want the job now they know the reality of it, and c) where the hell do they start Many reach for some kind of finance transformation program, but oftentimes it's the wrong move. So what are the right moves? I've built it out into a playbook I will share over the next 4 weeks during September, with the first part landing tomorrow Post I — Tomorrow — Inheriting a Shitshow - A personal story - How shit do you like it? Setting your level... - How to do your diligence before you accept the role - Sequencing your way out of the mess Post II — Catching the Bottom - Turn unknown problems into known, fixable ones - How to irrigate the balance sheet calmly and quickly - Use detail as both a diagnostic tool and a control mechanism - How to find the bodies and 1 hire you make before any other - Stop creating new mess while you clean up the old Post III — Repair Mode - Why repairing a finance function requires a different operating mode - Where to start, and the emergency lane for cash - Skill, Will and Hill: who you need around you in wartime - Build the team capable of carrying the repair Post IV — Ready to Transform - Know when the falling knife has finally stopped falling - Build a finance function that no longer depends on heroics - Use what you learned in the weeds to diagnose what really needs transforming - Building the transformation plan as the final output of repair If you want this Playbook. It is free to you, my friend, you just need to sign up to receive my email newsletter (linked in bio)

Just told my kid I “know a thing or two about a thing or two”

‘Truly understands financial forces’. That’s going on the headstone …

It actually took less time that I expected for nature to heal on this one