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Hey there,
Ever wonder what finance looks like when it stops chasing spreadsheets and starts running on live data? One education trust moved 22 schools onto a single platform so 25,000 invoices auto-fill and are flagged for anomalies; small businesses are getting pocket dashboards that show cash in real time; and lenders are now pricing debt based on verified sustainability metrics.
Take a moment to see how one clean source of truth can turn admin into faster, calmer decisions.
Quick Win For Your Finance Team
15-Minute Daily “Growth vs Burn Barometer.”
Every day, spend 15 minutes giving yourself and your CEO a simple, live read on whether you are in invest, careful, or defensive mode, so big decisions match today’s reality, not last quarter’s story.
Pull yesterday’s ending ARR (or recurring revenue), plus ARR from 3 months ago, along with yesterday’s cash balance and the trailing 3-month average net burn from your ERP/treasury.
In a one-tab sheet, calculate an annualized Growth % (ARR change over 3 months × 4) and a simple “Efficiency Score” = Growth % – Burn % (or use your Rule of 40 metric if you are SaaS).
Define three clear zones with your CEO and board:
Invest: Efficiency Score above your target band
Careful: In the middle band
Defensive: Below your comfort line
Color the current day’s cell based on which zone you are in, and add one short note: “Today we are in ___ mode because ___.”
At the top of the tab, keep a tiny 14-day trend of the Efficiency Score so you can see whether you are drifting up or down instead of reacting to a single noisy day.
Share a screenshot in your exec Slack or morning email 2–3 times a week with one line: “Given we are in [Invest/Careful/Defensive] mode, today’s bias should be to [lean in / trade off / protect].”
Immediate payoff:
You will align every hiring, pricing, and spending conversation to a single, current view of growth vs. burn, reduce whiplash between “grow at all costs” and “cut everything,” and build a daily habit in which finance quietly sets the guardrails for how aggressive the company can afford to be right now.
📊 One Database, 25,000 Invoices: How a Trust Cut Finance Admin
Running finance for 22 schools, Sapientia Education Trust ditched spreadsheets and siloed systems in favor of a single platform. Admin fell, heads got real-time dashboards, and 25,000 invoices now auto-populate and flag anomalies. Bulk buying and per-student cost views turned finance from paper shuffling into a partner that helps leaders make faster, better calls. See full article.
Why this matters (fast take):
🗃️ One Database, Zero Silos: 22 schools share records, eliminating monthly manual reconciliations and paper trails that once consumed a full day.
📈 Dashboards Drive Decisions: Role-based views let staff drill into transactions and check budgets anytime, and they can see costs per student and per staff member.
📱 Pocket CFO Tools Target Cash-Flow Stress Hitting 21% Of Owners
Small and mid-sized business owners can now carry a CFO in their pocket. Cloud finance tools put live cash views, predictive cash flow, and automated bank-feed matching on a phone. That tackles cash-flow stress affecting 21% of owners and shifts time from bookkeeping to decisions. The unlock is real-time data and automation, not end-of-month tidy-ups. See full article.
Fast move:
📱 Dashboards In Your Pocket: Live views show today’s cash and profitability, easing stress for the 21% who struggle and letting owners act before problems bite.
🔄 Books Keep Themselves: Bank feeds sync transactions with automated matching, cutting manual reconciliations and freeing hours to plan instead of chase paperwork.
💸 25 BPS Step-Up: Why ESG Covenants Now Move Your Debt Cost
Lenders are tying interest rates to emissions targets and reporting, forcing CFOs to treat sustainability like any other control. Miss a 15% carbon intensity cut, and some loans step up 25 bps, a £500,000 hit on £200 million of debt. UK SDR and California SB 253, plus investor pressure, make audit-ready data the new ticket to cheaper money. See full article.
Fast move:
💹 Greenium Fades: The old discount on green labels gives way to ESG-linked covenants that ratchet rates based on verified KPIs and audit-grade data.
📜 New Rules Bite: UK SDR demands ICFR-level rigor for sustainability data, while California SB 253 requires Scope 1 and 2 reporting for large firms in 2026.
Automation Play Of The Week
Daily Revenue Recognition Guardrail in Your Inbox
Automate a one-page daily view of new billings, deferred revenue, and revenue recognized so you stop asking “Did we book this correctly?” and instead start the day seeing where rev rec might be off. This guardrail uses your existing billing, ERP, and contract data and can be owned entirely by finance.
Pick the 5–7 rev rec KPIs: Decide what you want every morning (for example: billings yesterday, deferred revenue balance and movement, revenue recognized by product, largest new contracts added, and any manual rev rec entries).
Set up daily exports: Configure your billing system, ERP revenue subledger, and (if possible) CLM/contract tool to drop simple CSVs each night with consistent columns (customer, contract value, term, start/end dates, allocation, revenue recognized, deferred balance).
Build a single “Rev Rec Guardrail” tab: Use Excel or Google Sheets with data connections/Power Query to pull those files in and calculate each KPI on one summary tab, plus a short list of contracts with unusual patterns (for example, large up-front recognition or zero recognition despite active service).
Add exception rules: Flag contracts where revenue recognized exceeds straight-line or policy by more than a set percentage, where terms and revenue schedules do not match, or where manual journal entries touch key revenue and deferred accounts.
Automate refresh and email: Use Power Automate, Zapier, or a scheduled macro/script to refresh the file at a set time each morning and email the summary as a PDF to you, the controller, and your rev rec or FP&A lead.
Benefits:
Reduces the risk of revenue misstatements and audit surprises by making odd patterns and manual overrides visible every day.
Gives you a simple, repeatable way to sanity-check that growth, billings, and revenue recognition are actually aligned with contracts.
Control Check:
Once a week, have the controller compare the Rev Rec Guardrail totals and exceptions to the official revenue schedule and a sample of signed contracts, tightening mappings and rules wherever the guardrail misses something or throws noise.
📊 Take This Edition’s Poll:
This-or-that: if you could fix one finance bottleneck first, what would you choose?
Why It Matters
When records live in one place, teams spend less time reconciling and more time spotting issues early, buying smarter, and tracking costs that leaders actually care about. Real-time visibility is becoming a competitive baseline, not a nice-to-have, because cash stress and compliance demands punish slow, end-of-month thinking.
In 2026, the best finance teams will feel less like bookkeepers and more like navigators.
Until the next financial insight,
Corrine Maxwell
Editor-in-Chief
CFO Executive Insights
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