If AI is reshaping every part of the business… why is finance still stuck cleaning CSVs?

Real finance transformation starts by removing the manual, error-prone bottlenecks that consume your team's time. 

Aleph is the first AI-native FP&A platform that can be up and running in hours. It instantly connects all your cross-system data and spreadsheets (including Excel and Google Sheets), and uses auditable AI to automate reporting and analysis workflows that used to take days.

The result? Finance teams can finally focus on strategy and partnering with the business to power transformational change.

Secret CFO readers can try Aleph today for free

This thing had ground to a halt. And on my watch.

It was about to get embarrassing. The truth was simple. I was out of my depth, and I had to learn to swim fast.

I’d put my hand up for a high-profile post-merger integration project. My job was to smash together the finance functions of two huge, polar-opposite businesses. I wasn’t a CFO yet, but I’d climbed quickly into senior management and saw this as my shot at a divisional exec role.

Up to that point, my high-energy, collegiate, “smart, hard-working nice guy” routine had served me well. But a few months into leading this integration, that act hit a brick wall.

Bringing two very different finance teams together in the uncertainty of a merger is a minefield of complexity and politics. I needed a new edge. Good vibes and group hugs were not going to cut it.

The project had descended into a bureaucratic sh*tshow. I had a dedicated project manager feeding into a wider PMO. I was bending over backwards to keep everyone happy and find consensus. I figured the answers were “in the room.”

They were. They were just buried under layers of insecurity, noise, and personal turf wars.

Instead of progress, I was staring at 100-page slide decks, endless steering committees, Gantt charts, swim lanes, and dependency maps that looked like spaghetti. Ultimately, all of it was “plans to make a plan.” None of it moved us an inch.

It was a nightmare. And it had my name all over it.

The irony was, through all the fog, the end state was actually pretty clear to me: Which systems we needed. The shape of the combined finance function. 

But I was trying to drag everyone toward it by consensus. It wasn’t working. So I changed tack.

I stripped the noise away and built a simple, sharp vision for what the future finance function needed to be. A few slides. Just a clear end state and how it linked back to the merger thesis.

I took it to the newly appointed Group CFO - I wanted to be sure he saw it the same way. He loved it. He called a meeting with the Business Unit CFOs and asked me to present it.

I was reluctant as I felt it was missing a credible plan to deliver, but he was insistent.

At the end, he asked me one question: “What’s the first meaningful step towards this vision? The first big milestone?”

I told him: Two specific teams needed to be merged into one and colocated. Everything else depended on that move.

“Great,” he said. “Do that. Focus on nothing else. Get it done in three months.”

Then he turned to the BU CFOs and told them they were accountable for clearing obstacles and giving me whatever I needed.

After the meeting, he pulled me aside:

“Do you remember much physics from school?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Do you remember the formula for pressure exerted?”

“Force divided by area, right?”

“Exactly. You’ve been applying the right amount of force, but across too wide an area. So, you haven’t created enough pressure to actually move anything. This is a common mistake in corporate change. Your job is to create pressure in the right place at the right time. Don’t worry about having it all worked out. Everyone is winging it, even me. Just get the boulder rolling. That’s how big change happens. One focused effort at a time.”

He was right. And that lesson has stayed with me for over fifteen years.

Welcome to a new series on Finance Transformation. Last month, we covered how to scale a finance function and how to build maturity in the right place at the right time.

This series is a much deeper look at the toolkit you need to make change actually happen in a finance team.

Let’s start at the beginning…

What is Finance Transformation?

Put simply, finance transformation means delivering radical changes in how finance operates. Finance functions are always on. There is always an invoice to raise, a month to close, a budget to finalize. Making changes in how finance does things is difficult. You are trying to fix the plane while its in the air.

So, you end up waiting for a quieter time. Maybe you can evaluate new FP&A tools in that window between the 6 + 6 forecast and the long-range plan. Or revamp the balance sheet reconciliation process in the fifth week of a five-week period.

But, let’s get real…that quiet time never comes.

Default: Status Quo

The months and years fly by because there’s always another business priority to chase.

So… inertia rules. In other words; nothing changes.

Good transformation leadership is about creating pressure in the right place to break that inertia, until the change has enough momentum to become its own flywheel.

That’s about finance team culture as much as anything else… and we’ll be digging into it properly in this series. How do you build a culture where improvement happens almost automatically?

To kick us off, let’s look at one success story.

Microsoft Finance Transformation Case Study

Microsoft’s finance team found itself in its own Excel hell a decade or so ago: siloed systems, labor-intensive processes, and an explosion in data volumes. And like most big companies at the time, finance had quietly accepted it all as normal.

This was one of the world’s most powerful technology companies, not even eating its own cooking.

That started to change in 2013 when Amy Hood took over as CFO (she still is today). She’d come up through the business and knew how finance operated. What she inherited was a global function built for control, not speed. What she built was something very different: a modern, high-leverage finance team that could scale with the business, and keep headcount lean (And therefore speed high).

Here’s what changed:

The result was a finance function that could absorb massive growth and complexity without ballooning in size. Faster close. Better forecasting. More insight. Fewer repetitive tasks. More meaningful work. Sure, tech played a big part, but the real work was creating a culture of transformation. One that had not just the appetite to modernize, but also the organizational muscle to execute.

It’s no surprise Microsoft gets cited as a gold standard for finance transformation..

Note - If you want to learn more about how it went down, you can listen to Cory Hrncirik, Microsoft's Senior Director, Frontier Finance Transformation (cool title).

More important than ever

This all links back to the previous series, where we talked about the three muscles needed to unlock new stages of finance maturity: people, tools, and data. One way to think about finance transformation is that it’s the attitude that enables the muscles. The one that unlocks a finance function’s ability to actually change.

Imagine an athlete trying to break the world deadlift record. They’d need new levels of leg strength, grip strength, stability, etc. But underneath all of that is the ambition, mental elasticity, and commitment that make any of those improvements possible in the first place.

That’s the finance transformation muscle. And that’s what we’re talking about in this series. But it’s not about one person. It’s about unlocking that capability across an entire organization - which is the real magic, and exactly what Amy Hood managed to do.

As you can probably imagine, this is no easy feat. I’ve been lucky to be part of some great finance transformation programs. I’ve also been part of more failed ones than I’d like to admit.

Lucky for you, each one of those experiences helped me learn how not to get burned again. So, here are 7 cardinal sins I see CFOs and their teams make in finance transformation projects:

Finance transformation is a lifestyle, not a task on a to-do list. Just like trying to lose weight, it only works when you weave it into everything you do. Treat it like a “project” and it dies the moment something louder shows up.

I’ve seen it a hundred times. A team is convinced that new software will magically fix their problems. Technology is never 100 percent of the issue, and almost never the first step. No system on earth can outrun broken processes or shitty behaviors.

Shared resource pools look efficient on paper. In reality, they turn into political battlegrounds as teams fight for development time, project managers, and analysts who report to no one. Small, directly accountable teams deployed properly, will always beat a centralized grab-bag of experts who belong to everyone and no one.

You will never know the full scope on day one. Too many transformations stall because analytical finance people want to see every step before they start moving. The better play is to just get going. Know where you are, know the end state, and take one meaningful step in the right direction with total focus.

Transformation often lives in Covey’s Quadrant II: important but not urgent. Which is where good work goes to die. Finance is too reactive in nature to ever have time to get to noble Quadrant II work. Which is why you want to transform in the first place … right? There is always another close, another reforecast, another fire drill. You need to put finance transformation on a burning platform - make it urgent - or nothing will move.

If the vision is too abstract, nobody believes it. But if it isn’t big and inspiring enough, you won’t unlock the best ideas. The sweet spot is a vision bold enough to energize the team but real enough that it feels achievable. We’ll dig into how to do this for finance next week.

Inertia is hard enough without people actively pushing the boulder the other way. It’s easy to think you will change people who don’t want change. Maybe you will… one time in ten. In the meantime, your transformation is hardening like concrete around them. Remove them early.

Series Overview

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be getting hyper-tactical in how to actually deliver finance transformation. Here’s what is in store:

Finance transformation is one of the hardest things a CFO ever has to pull off. It is upgrading the hamster wheel while it is spinning at full speed. You drive it through a small group of committed specialists.

But …the impact has to land across the whole team and the wider business. That is a cultural challenge. Next week, we will get deep into how you lead that cultural transformation as CFO.

This series is dedicated to a former colleague and friend who recently lost a long health battle. We’d worked together on a big finance transformation program in the past. I had planned to consult them in preparing this series, but sadly, it was not to be.

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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.