Most AI magic in finance shows up in the unglamorous work.

We collected 15 real-world prompts that finance teams use today across FP&A, accounting, and ops to streamline routine tasks.

Steal these prompts to create headspace for better judgment, collaboration, and stories that power the decisions that matter.

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I’ve just finished Unreal, the Netflix documentary that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the pro wrestling industry. And right at the highest level: the WWE.

There’s a scene where Chief Creative Officer Paul Levesque (“Triple H” to those of us who grew up in the Attitude Era) is dressing down wrestler LA Knight after a ladder match.

For those of you who haven’t had your brain rotted by the soap opera that is WWE, the goal of a ladder match is to be the first opponent to climb the 10-foot ladder (which also doubles as a weapon) and retrieve the championship belt hanging from the rafters. Yes, I realize how absurd that all sounds.

LA Knight (aren’t the names great?!) was supposed to lose. But not just lose. He had to lose, but get oh-so close to winning. The kind of breathless, “will he, won’t he” rhythm that makes the wrestling spectacle special. The finish was designed so the camera would catch him one final rung of the ladder from glory before it was ripped away.

Instead, Knight climbed the wrong side of the ladder. Oops.

He still lost. But he lost wrong… and the cameras never got the hero shot. The ending looked limp. Months of narrative investment, gone with one crucial misstep.

Watching Levesque explain to Knight why that mattered was fascinating to watch. His commitment to the detail of the story was something to see.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

“Secret… you do know it’s all fake, right?”

To which I say this …. how DARE you.

First up: shhhhh, there might be children listening. Don’t spoil it. And second, if you’d seen this happen in real time, you wouldn’t call it fake:

It’s not fake. But it is predetermined… and those are violently different things.

It’s a story… one that requires flawless execution (even if it rarely gets it.)

And, it’s never just one story. It’s a whole complex economy of narratives with hundreds of characters and dozens of events.

WWE produces three main storyline shows each week + two supporting shows. That’s five hours of live television a week. Then there’s a Premium Live Event every month. Not to mention house shows, social content, and press tours. All of it funnelling toward WrestleMania (the fiscal year end of professional wrestling), where the major storylines finally reconcile on the biggest stage.

Then, the very next night, RAW goes live, and the whole thing starts again.

Dozens of arcs overlap at different maturities. New talent must be “put over” with the crowd, while legends need dignified exits. Characters carry decades of history.

And that’s just the writing.

Execution is another beast entirely: live TV with no edit button, giant egos, and the ever-present possibility that the seven-foot monster simply decides he doesn’t feel like losing today. Add injuries - one mistimed dive through a table - and months of planning vanish, replaced by a gaping plot hole.

To survive that chaos, pro wrestling runs on a strict code, complex rules, and has a whole language of its own. The basics:

Kayfabe is sacrosanct in wrestling. It’s where reality and fiction merge.

In Unreal, they tell the story of the major knee injury to Seth Rollins (a main event star). The whole thing was a work (fiction). But only two or three people were told. Writers, referees, the whole locker room believed it was genuine.

Rollins wore a brace in public for months. He wouldn’t leave the house without crutches. They even had to brief his child’s kindergarten teacher after the kid mentioned “Daddy’s pretend boo-boo.”

All so that, months later at SummerSlam, Rollins could reveal he wasn’t injured at all and would return immediately to cash in the title shot he’d earned (coincidentally) in that earlier botched ladder match:

That’s industrial-level commitment to storytelling. WWE writers have to think in multiple time horizons at once:

There is no financial model to help WWE writers predict outcomes to their stories. Just crowd reaction, instinct, and the need to keep the story moving without breaking the rules of the world.

Last week, we broke down the anatomy of a story and why finance professionals are, by default, terrible at telling them. Not because we lack intelligence. But because we over-index on data and under-index on attention… and, well, actual storytelling.

And so we are looking outside of finance for inspiration. In fact, we are looking a million miles away from the day job, and that’s why we started at the WWE.

The comparison between finance storytelling and the WWE is not as ridiculous as it sounds:

Now, there are some big differences too.

WWE operates at a level of narrative volume and complexity that would make most CFOs break out in hives.

They are very, very good at it. We are… not.

And finally: WWE storytelling involves a lot of baby oil. Ours generally do not (unless you have a very good HR department).

A story hierarchy describes the nested structure of time and scale inside a set of narratives.

This is best explained with an example. I’ll give you a rest from the WWE.

Instead, let’s use one of the all-time great TV dramas: Breaking Bad.

When Vince Gilligan first pitched Breaking Bad, he did it in six words: “What if Mr. Chips became Scarface?” That was the entire series arc. The legend goes that he kept those words written on a whiteboard in the writers’ room for nearly a decade. A constant reminder of the transformation they were building toward. But underneath that six-word premise sat a carefully structured story, designed across multiple timeframes.

Here’s how it broke down. (Spoiler warning.)

I told you I was no fun to watch TV with.

You, too, will have different narrative time units (and causality) in your business. And that starts with the end of the story.

In some businesses, that end point is obvious and often tied to a liquidity event.

For a PE-backed CFO, the exit is rarely more than 3–4 years away. Even if that exit actually takes eight years and two recaps, the story is always pitched to the exit.

Same idea in a late-stage VC-backed company. The “end of the story” might be the IPO.

In fact, it’s the centrality and consistency of those story arcs that bind the team to a target outcome.

Meanwhile, a family-owned business is different. There’s no ticking clock, no obvious liquidity event to build toward. If you want the same level of alignment and urgency, you need a bigger narrative, something that replaces the discipline an exit automatically creates.

Or if you work at SpaceX, the story ends with putting people on Mars. Slightly different time horizon.

Underneath that big arc sit shorter ones. It could be a multi-year project. A complex ERP rollout, for example. More commonly, it’s the fiscal year. Then the quarter. The month. The week. Even yesterday can be a beat in the story.

The key with any financial storytelling is to know what timeframe you’re operating in and to make sure everyone else knows it too.

If you’ve had a sh*t quarter and need to buy time to reach a stronger H2, you might build a story for your lenders that frames a weak Q1 inside a stronger year. But if you know that the bad quarter is actually the start of a bad year, then that same story will catch you out later, so better frame it differently now.

Sometimes it’s not even time-bound. It’s thematic. Tariff chaos in 2025, for example. The short-term story may be very different from the long-term one. There were plenty of US-based manufacturing CFOs on earnings calls last summer telling the world about “short-term headwinds, with a structurally positive long-term outlook.” I’ve been there…

The key is intentionality. You must be explicit about the timeframe you’re operating in and make sure your story respects it.

Especially internally.

I’ve made this mistake myself. I once told the story of a weak quarter inside what was actually a strong year, but I failed to frame it properly. Employees walked away believing we were “doing badly,” when all I’d meant to say was that we were on track, but we needed to avoid complacency.

Remember last week, I talked about transformation being the core of any story?

A story arc is simply the shape of that transformation over a given period of time.

At a super tactical level, it might be this:

In last week’s exec meeting, you agreed to push an urgent price increase through with a key customer, to repair a margin issue. Reporting back this week on whether that happened, and what changed as a result, resolves a short-term story arc with a specific audience (the exec).

Meanwhile, at the other end of the telescope, you might be building toward something much bigger: an IPO, a refinance, a liquidity event, a full strategic repositioning.

That’s a long arc.

The craft is in combining arcs of different lengths so they:

But doing that well is hard.

Let’s say market conditions push your exit from two years out to four. But your debt still matures in 30 months. Now you’ve got refinancing risk layered on top of a delayed liquidity event.

And all of that has to be managed differently with shareholders, lenders, employees, etc.

You’ve just changed the long arc for all of them.

And now there’s tension between stakeholders. And that tension feeds straight back into the message, and into how the shorter arcs have to be handled too.

Because every quarterly update, every board discussion, every lender conversation now sits inside that structural mismatch. As the business reality shifted, so did the whole storytelling process.

And how do you control this complexity?

Here’s what I use… a little device I call the CFO Story Map.

In this example, let’s say you’ve identified six key audiences - each needing a different story - and three key time units:

Here’s how I like to map those story beats:

I like this structure because it forces your core messaging onto one page. If there are glaring mismatches or inconsistencies, they should jump straight out.

It ensures the same fundamental truths underpin every stakeholder lens and timeframe.

And you can map it directly onto your FP&A or reporting cadence. Externally, your shortest unit might be a quarter (10-Qs or earnings calls). Whereas internally, it might be weekly, driven by internal reporting. That’s fine. It helps you make sure you have consistency where you need consistency and tension where you expect tension.

Of course, the actual story, the narrative itself, will need far more meat on the bones than this (more on that next week). But it’s infinitely easier to build something coherent when the guardrails are already set.

The CFO Story Map gives you those guardrails, the structure on which you build your whole storybook.

CFO storytelling is complex.

You have multiple stakeholders, each needing a different lens on the same fundamental truth. And on top of that, the story shifts depending on the time frame you’re speaking to: long arc, medium arc, short arc.

It’s easy to tie yourself in knots. You either fail to adapt the story to the audience… or you confuse them by talking in the wrong time frame.

But if you’re intentional, you can map those narrative arcs. You can see the tensions. And that’s what disciplined CFO storytelling looks like.

Next week, we’ll get practical. We’ll break down how to actually build these stories for the highest-stakes rooms: board meetings, earnings calls, and the moments that really matter.

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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.