Thinking from insidethe finance function.
Based on what Spurwing sees from inside client finance functions. Every piece here started as a pattern that showed up in mandate work, usually more than once: what breaks when nobody owns the finance function, what that costs before anyone notices, and what changes once someone does.
Diligence is not an audit. It is a test of whether you know your own business.
An auditor asks whether the numbers are right. An investor asks whether the business is what you said it is, and whether you are the person who would know.
Interim, fractional and full-time are three different purchases.
Interim and fractional get used as though they describe the same arrangement at different intensities. They do not. One fills a seat that has emptied. The other builds a capability the business has never had, and buying the wrong one costs most on the day the cover ends.
What should one of your companies charge the other?
It feels like moving money between pockets in the same coat. Two tax authorities are looking at the same transaction, and you are the only party who thinks the companies are the same thing.
What your accountant is not being asked to do.
Your accountant answers what happened, accurately and on time. Nobody was asked what happens next, and that is the half the business is actually run on.
Your biggest client might be your least profitable one.
One business found its largest customer, worth 20 per cent of revenue, was absorbing a little over 30 per cent of what the business spent. Every number in the accounts was correct. Nobody had asked what that one client actually cost to keep.
The raise will not fail on your numbers. It will slow down on them.
A two-week diligence becomes a six-week diligence, the questions get more basic rather than less, and somewhere in week four the conversation stops being about what the business could be worth.
The first finance hire: usually a year too late, and usually the wrong one.
The instinct is right about the work and wrong about the order. Hiring the person who does the work before deciding what the function should look like produces a finance function that has to be taken apart and rebuilt, usually at the worst possible moment.
You are eighteen months into the second country and nobody owns the group.
Two answers with a delay between them, a filing nobody had heard of, and a payment late because the money is in the other country. Individually annoyances. Together, one problem wearing several disguises.
Why you are still approving invoices at nine at night.
If you are still approving invoices late at night, the approval is standing in for something else. Controls are not about audits. They are about how fast the business can move without you in the middle of it.
The cost of entering a market is not the cost of running in one.
Entering a market gets modelled. Running in one does not. The overhead starts at full price, the revenue does not, and everything doubles at the border.
The fragmented finance tax: what a stitched-together finance function actually costs you.
A bookkeeper, an accountant, a consultant who comes in a few times a year, and a founder holding it all together in their head. It looks cheap until you count what it hides: decisions made on numbers that do not quite line up, controls nobody owns, and surprises that arrive late.
Your lawyer's job ends at signature. Yours starts there.
The agreement gets negotiated over six weeks, marked up three times, signed, and filed. For most businesses that is the last time anybody reads it. The clauses that only pay if somebody works them go unworked, and the ones that only bite if somebody misses them get missed.
The moment your cash position stops being a number and starts being a decision.
Most growing businesses can tell you the bank balance. Far fewer can tell you what it will be in 90 days, and why that matters for the call they are about to make. The gap between those two states is where CFO-level thinking starts.
What investors actually mean when they ask for better reporting.
The ask for “better reporting” from a board or investor is rarely about the format. It is almost always about trust. A pattern worth understanding before the next board pack is due.
The founder-as-CFO problem: when financial complexity outgrows the person carrying it.
A common pattern in growing businesses. The founder is carrying the finance function in their head, and the complexity has passed what any one person should be holding. It rarely resolves itself.
The tax advice was right. The question was wrong.
Somebody told you to put the property in a separate company. The advice was correct, and eighteen months later the bank wants security over an asset that now sits outside the entity holding the facility.
Rather work it out than read about it? Five questions separate an accountant from a financial manager from a CFO, and eight statements say whether the business has outgrown the way it is run today.
Recognise any of this in your own numbers?
If the patterns in these pieces look familiar, that is usually a signal the finance function has outgrown the setup around it.
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