📬 Accountant-in-chief: Should the CFO or controller own the books?

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Now, on to today’s Mailbag.

We’ve got some great topics. Here’s what’s on tap:

Now, let’s get into it.

Loubloub from France asked:

You often emphasize the importance of a CFO being truly “bulletproof” from an accounting and controlling standpoint, essentially acting as the accountant-in-chief of the organization.

For professionals like myself, who did not come from a formal finance or accounting background but have learned on the job and now want to strengthen their fundamentals, I would really value your perspective on the following points:

- What are the core accounting principles and topics a CFO must absolutely master in order to effectively run a finance function?

- Which accounting-related areas should a finance team always be fully on top of (e.g., closing, revenue recognition, controls, compliance, etc.)?

- Are there any high-quality resources, training, or learning paths you would recommend to close potential gaps and build a rock-solid accounting foundation?

Thanks a lot for your time and your content - I can not express enough how much it helps!

I hate to be a pedant (I don’t), but I need to correct one thing.

You, the CFO, do not need to personally be bulletproof at accounting and controlling.
Your function does.

The CFO must act as the accountant-in-chief of the organization, but that doesn’t mean you are doing the accounting. Just that you are giving it your personal stamp of approval.

Being able to look a CEO, investor, or board member in the eye and know the numbers are right is not optional. Accountability for the financial truth sits with you, whether you like accounting or not.

In a small business, that usually means getting your hands dirty. In a larger business, it often means being very good at hiring, structuring, and holding the right people accountable. But outsourcing accountability is not a thing.

So let’s be clear on what “mastery” actually means.

You do not need to master every accounting standard. In fact, you don’t really need to know many at all (I barely do). You need to master the system that makes the accounting work.

The most important accounting skill a CFO can have is the ability to build, develop, manage, and retain a strong controlling and accounting team. If you get that right, a lot of risk goes away. If you get it wrong, almost nothing else you do will matter.

That said, it is vastly easier to do that well if you understand what you are looking at.

Here are some things I think CFOs should be comfortable reviewing.

First, a baseline understanding of the core transaction cycles. Order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, payroll, inventory, fixed assets. You should have a high level understanding of the core process, how data flows through the system, and where it can break. Otherwise, how do you know that flashy report you take to the board each month is actually right?

Second, balance sheet literacy. Almost every high-profile CFO failure traces back to the balance sheet, not the P&L. You should be able to scan a balance sheet and spot things that look unusual, stale, or hand-wavy. It’s not rocket science:

Third, judgment areas. Where is your function making significant assumptions or policy decisions in your name that materially affect the numbers? Revenue recognition, reserves, accruals, capitalization policies, impairment. You don’t need to calculate these yourself, but you do need to understand the logic and challenge it.

Fourth, controls and close discipline. You should care about how the books get closed, how long it takes, what gets reconciled, and what doesn’t. Sloppy closes and weak controls are never isolated problems. These aren’t things you need to micromanage every month, but you do need a clear sense of where you are today and where you’re heading so you can hold your controller and the business to account.

Again - you don’t need to be looking at balance reconciliations - but surely you want to know who is. And how you can be sure you don’t have a large part of the balance sheet unmanaged.

I think of these as leadership-level accounting skills. You are responsible for the integrity of the machine, not for booking COGS yourself.

I recently saw a high-profile company (not huge, think hundreds of millions of revenue) publicly fire its controller for major accounting failures, while the CFO “temporarily assumed” the Principal Accounting Officer role like some kind of hero stepping in. I find that framing distasteful. If your controller blew up the accounting, that is not just their failure. It is a leadership failure… your review failed too.

“I thought the controller had it under control” is not an acceptable CFO defense.

The title is Chief. Financial. Officer. The pay reflects that responsibility. So chiefly officiate those finances, big dog. That means being accountable for the integrity of the numbers, not just the fun parts of the job.

As for resources, this is the frustrating bit. There is no great, widely accepted program that teaches non-accounting CFOs the leadership-level accounting skills they actually need. Not a CPA. Not an MBA.

It’s a shame, but my inbox is packed with first-time CFOs who’ve come in from PE, IB, consulting, or operations. It’s always the same message:
“I feel wildly out of my depth on accounting and controlling. It’s a much bigger and more important part of the job than I thought.”

At least they recognize it’s important. That’s more than half the battle.

Come to think of it… Maybe a program to fill this exact gap is something I need to build. If that would be useful, hit reply and tell me. If there’s enough demand, I will.

Until then: lean in, ask uncomfortable questions, spend time on the balance sheet, and hire people who are better accountants than you and listen to them.

Thanks for the question.

Timelord from USA asked:

I don't think Finance and Accounting professionals talk enough about work hours. What advice would you give young Finance & Accounting professionals on:

1) how much you can expect to work in typical F&A roles as you progress,

2) where those extra hours pay off (e.g., working 80 hours as an Investment Banking VP should pay better than an overwhelmed accounting manager during quarterly close), and

3) how you can get those above-and-beyond hours to count so they aren't wasted (better bonus or more likely progression).

Thanks for the question, Timelord.

I’ll be blunt: 60–70 hours a week in your early finance career is not unreasonable if you want outsized outcomes. In fact, I’d argue it’s a feature, not a bug.

Most people won’t do it. That’s the point.

The problem with 80+ hour workweeks is that they aren’t sustainable for long. I know plenty of folks in IB who have done it for ten years plus, their personal lives are all disasters…

That said, I don’t know anyone who’s had disproportionate success in finance or business who didn’t spend a long stretch grinding harder than the median. Usually a decade. Often more. Not forever. But long enough to build momentum.

That doesn’t mean “always on” or “burn yourself into the ground.” It means deliberately choosing to put in more reps than the people around you when you have the energy, flexibility, and fewer external constraints. For most people, that window is their 20s and early 30s.

And let’s be clear: working long hours is necessary but not sufficient. Plenty of people work 70 hours and go nowhere. The difference is where those hours go.

It’s a wasted effort if you’re working 60–70 hours doing the same reconciliations, firefighting broken processes, or absorbing organizational dysfunction. You’re just subsidizing mediocrity with your precious time.

But if those extra hours are spent:

Then those hours compound aggressively.

An extra 5–10 hours a week, spent on the right things, over 5–10 years, creates a gap that is almost impossible to close later. You’ve seen more. Broken more. Fixed more. Built more trust. Created more surface area for luck.

I made a conscious decision early on to work harder than most people around me. Not heroically. Just consistently.  I’m very glad I did. I put the yards in before I had kids, before life got heavier, when the opportunity cost was lowest. I look back now and still wonder what the hell I did with the rest of my time in those days.

By the time I hit my 30s, the boulder was already rolling. I had leverage. I was leading teams, setting agendas, and choosing problems to tackle. And I was much more personally efficient, too. At that point, the effort started to work for me, not against me.

One important thing, though: I didn’t optimize for compensation or titles early. I optimized for learning. Every single day. If the technical work was familiar, I’d zoom out and learn how it connected to incentives, behavior, or decision-making. That’s how you turn long hours into an investment instead of a tax.

So yes, if you want a balanced, comfortable career, you can absolutely aim for 40–45 hours, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But if you want outsized outcomes, you should probably accept a period of outsized effort. Just make sure it’s on the right things.

TLDR: If you want to win in your career, expect to work your ass off early on, and make sure those extra hours are spent learning, fixing real problems, and building judgment.

MBA in a CFO Role from Bengaluru, India asked:

Hey, first up, I want to thank you for your posts, in getting me a head of finance role at a seed-stage startup. They really helped clarify a lot of thoughts, and the vision of finance I was able to create from those really sold my candidacy. The role is a combination of finance and ops - 100% responsible for finance, and also tasked with monitoring delivery on ops. For now. If I do this well, I will probably get the ops responsibility fully. Will let you know how that goes.

My question - I'm stepping into a place where finance is in complete chaos. I have not yet completed week 1. The controller sucks - ignoring founder/investor calls, ignoring tax notices, etc. I fired him and got an ex-employee who runs his own practice as a consultant, while I'm now hiring a replacement.

We are fundraising with a very short runway (the founder left it a little late, honestly). Everything seems on fire. No one knows why my revenue calc on MIS does not match what was reported earlier. The playbook I created for my first 90 days seems inadequate. How would you suggest I take back control? This is a SaaS business - a US entity, with India as a back office. We all sit in India, except sales, which sits in the US.

PS - I'm loving this, but would like to make this less chaotic quickly.

Haha. Welcome to your first Head of Finance role. This sounds… FUN.

Yeah, you’re going to have to f*ck off your carefully crafted 90-day plan. Forget an induction, you are straight into triage and firefighting.

The good news is: you’re asking the right questions, your instincts are sound, and you clearly have the appetite for chaos. That already puts you ahead of where the business was a week ago.

So let’s get practical and ruthless about priorities.

First: accept that you do not currently have “accounts.” You have numbers. Those are not the same thing. If revenue doesn’t reconcile, tax notices are being ignored, and your controller was ghosting founders and investors, then the books are not a source of truth.

You did the right thing by firing fast. Now your only objective on the accounting side is transactional integrity:

Your interim consultant needs one mandate: make the plumbing work well enough that it stops leaking everywhere. Nothing more. No “improvements.” No report redesigns. Just stop the bleeding.

Second: you personally run the business on cash. Immediately. In a situation like this, accounting is a lagging indicator. Cash is truth.

Build a 13-week rolling cash flow forecast and own it yourself. Not FP&A fancy. Not GAAP compliant. Just:

Refresh it every week. Compare it to last week’s version and understand the movement. Compare the latest actuals to the latest forecast and understand why you were wrong.

This will help you see life and death situations coming before it’s too late, and it will accelerate your understanding of the business. Over time you can start to put some modeling behind the assumptions

This model becomes your control tower while everything else is being rebuilt. It will also force conversations the business has probably been avoiding: collections, payment timing, payroll commitments, founder decisions.

If you do nothing else in the next two weeks, do this.

Third: reset expectations with investors early. Do not wait until they ask why things are messy. Go to them.

Tell them plainly: what you inherited, what is broken, what you are fixing, what you can and cannot promise in the short term

Then commit to process transparency. For example:

Investors can handle bad news. They cannot handle surprises. Right now, your job is to become a trusted narrator of reality rather than their good news guy.

Fourth: fundraising is about the future, not the past.

Yes, weak books are a problem. But early-stage fundraising is still mostly a forward-looking exercise.

Your job here is to get very crisp on forward looking assumptions for:

This phase is brutal, but it’s also where reputations get made.

You’re doing exactly what you should be doing. Work like hell, move with urgency, trust your judgment, and don’t let anyone drag you into “nice to have” work until the basics are locked.

You’ve got this.

TLDR: Forget the plan, take control through cash, fix the accounting plumbing, reset investor expectations early, and stabilize before you try to improve anything.

A few of the biggest stories that every CFO is paying close attention to. This is the section you might not want to see your name in.

Hot-ish take: we are going to see more and more of this in 2026. Big Four will start to lean in, corporate treasury will start to recognize the advantages of stablecoins, enterprise crypto security will make strides…

My advice? I think it’s time to listen and lean in.

“Accounting is not going away. If you go back and look, calculators didn’t make accounting go away. Spreadsheets didn’t make accounting go away.”

Great controllers (who can implement AI) are going to be far in more demand than any FP&A pro over the coming years.

ICYMI, here are some of my favorite finance/business social media posts from this week. In the words of Kendall Roy, “all bangers, all the time.”:

All that “work” just to underperform the S&P 500…

Let me know what you thought of today’s Mailbag. Just hit reply… I read every message.

In Saturday’s Playbook, we reopened the door to the all-important world of cashflow. Check out the newsletter here.

Disclaimer: I am not your accountant, tax advisor, lawyer, CFO, director, or friend. Well, maybe I’m your friend, but I am not any of those other things. Everything I publish represents my opinions only, not advice. Running the finances for a company is serious business, and you should take the proper advice you need.