Are you ready for a CFO?Eight statements, in three groups.

Tick the ones you agree with. Each statement carries underneath it what it costs the business, so the reading is useful whether or not you tick it. The three groups score separately, and the result names which of the three is the actual problem rather than giving you a total. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored: it runs in your browser and disappears when you close the page.

What you can see

Whether the numbers answer a question in time to act on it.

Gross margin by client or by product line would take more than a day to produce, or I would not fully trust it when it arrived.Pricing and client decisions get made on impression. I could not say today what the bank balance will be in ninety days, or what that figure depends on.Every commitment is made without knowing what it closes off. In the last year a number surprised me that somebody should have seen coming.The information is arriving as history rather than as warning.

How much runs through you

Whether the finance side has an owner other than the founder.

Nobody but me would notice if the numbers stopped making sense.You are the control, and controls that are people do not scale. Something in the business stops if I am away for three weeks.The constraint on the business is your calendar. When an adviser answers a question, nobody checks the answer against the rest of the business.You are buying correct answers to questions nobody framed.

Whether it was built on purpose

Whether the function was designed, and whether it can answer what is coming.

Nobody ever decided what the finance function should look like. It grew.Every addition makes it larger rather than better. A decision in the next twelve months turns on the numbers, and I could not say today which way it goes: a raise, a facility, a large hire, a new market, or a sale.The decision gets made on instinct, or it waits until somebody outside sets the date.

What you can see0/3

Runs through you0/3

Built on purpose0/2

How to read it

The three groups score separately, and which group is heaviest matters more than the total. A business whose ticks are all in the first group has an information problem and can usually fix it without hiring anybody. A business whose ticks are all in the second has an ownership problem, and adding capacity underneath will not touch it. A business whose ticks are in the third has neither, until something arrives that tests both.

Whatever the count, the last statement carries a date on it that belongs to somebody else.

Settled that something has to change, but not what? Work through the six questions that separate an accountant from a financial manager from a CFO.

Whatever the three groups came to.

The useful question is not how many boxes you ticked. It is what the business can still do on the day you stop holding it together.

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