Why doesn’t revenue in the board pack tie to the management accounts? Is that expense a one-off in August or is it recurring? What is our revenue recognition policy?

None of these are hard. The issue is that the answers are scattered across three systems in your head… which makes you the most expensive search bar in the company.

Campfire’s AI-powered ERP puts that context back in the system of record (where it should have been all along). Why is that useful? It means those answers can be at your fingertips without having to carry them in your head.

One of the most human things ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini does is forget what you told it 20 minutes ago.

You can be deep into a thread, making great progress, when suddenly it suggests something you told it not to do 10 messages earlier.

So you give it a gentle reprimand. Very gentle... (these things might be holding the nuclear football one day.)

And back it comes: “Ah sorry bro, my bad. I forgot that.”

Very human, very … relatable.

One unexpected thing about playing with AI is how much it's taught me about my own brain.

I won’t pretend I understand all the technical stuff about context windows, vector stores and whatever else the nerds are talking about this week.

But I've come to understand that an AI model can only work with so much context at once. In a long conversation, some of that earlier information can get lost, compressed, or simply overlooked.

That is, unless you've given it a better way to work out what's important. Somewhere to go and retrieve it when needed. That's where things like Projects, persistent instructions, and searchable knowledge bases come in.

Our brains aren't so different. We can only hold so much in our heads, and focus on even less at once. Which is a problem when you're a CFO juggling hundreds of different things across the business… especially when there are so many numbers.

I've worked with a few executives who tried to run everything from memory. One or two had genuinely extraordinary memories. Almost photographic. But they were the exceptions. And even they didn't rely on memory alone.

The others were just a disorganized ‘hot mess’ (I have teenage kids, remember) who quite enjoyed showing off how much they could remember. Which was never as much as they needed.

Which brings me back to that CEO who carried a bulging lever-arch file everywhere he went I told you about a few weeks ago.

It wasn't particularly well organized, but he knew where to look.

That file was effectively an extension of his memory, freeing up his head to focus on the problem in front of him. Like a spare brain.

And perhaps that's the secret to being a supersonic, omnipresent CFO. Not having a superhuman brain, but building a bloody good spare one.

In week one, we established why you need a CFO operating system (and how you already have one, whether you realize it or not).

In week two, we talked about the four different operating modes of the CFO role and how you need to divide your attention across them.

Last week, we went through a system for creating capacity and efficiency in your calendar, freeing up time to solve the biggest problems in the business without letting the day job drop.

This week, we're tackling the other side of that equation. How you manage all the information, risks, decisions, and loose ends rattling around in your head, without letting them consume the mental capacity you need to actually do the job.

Freeing up your calendar is only useful if you can also free up your brain.

And the CFO role carries a particular kind of mental load. You're constantly thinking about what could go wrong. And you’re making sure those risks are managed so the rest of the organization can focus on beautiful growth.

And rhe answer to "what could go wrong?" is… an awful lot.

As the ground shifts beneath your feet, you're constantly recalculating whether the business can accept a reasonable worst-case scenario.

I once had beautiful, flowing, luscious dark brown locks. Now? Just gray. Gray everywhere. Yes, I’m afraid my friend … I've got a face for animation.

And if you're not careful, that downside exposure mindset can become paralyzing. It's part of where the stereotype of CF-no comes from. And it can be hard to break out of.

It creates its own set of specific challenges:

AI is already an absolute game-changer here. And you don't need complex agents or expensive infrastructure to transform your personal operating system.

Give it access to a sprawling, multidimensional mess of conversations, files, numbers, decisions, projects and people, and it can help you connect the dots, retrieve the relevant pieces, and put them in front of you when you need them.

It's like taking that CEO's lever-arch file and expanding it a thousandfold... without looking like a dork or breaking your back carrying it around.

Next week, I’ll share the operating system I used to run the CFO role (and other functions) in a complex, multibillion-dollar business, and how I'd use AI today to turbocharge it.

I know it works because I'm already using it in my work and personal life. Between building a fast-growing media business, managing an investment portfolio with board roles thrown into the mix, and the general circus of life with teenage kids, I've had plenty of opportunities to put it to the test.

But despite what some AI finance creators might tell you, that is not just a 5 minute Claude prompt away.

It takes experience, knowing your craft, and the ability to codify how you work.

AI can absolutely invent a system for you. The hard bit is knowing what to build.

So, I’m going to park AI until next week, but first we need to set up the different mental systems for storing and retrieving information you might need.

Imagine all the information you need as a CFO laid out in a library.

Some books you need open on the desk in front of you. Others you need within arm's reach. Most can sit on the shelves until you need them, ideally with a good librarian who knows when to bring you the right one. And some belong in the archive, or frankly, the bin.

Now imagine that the books you need, and where you need them, change every bloody day. Building the dexterity to do this well, is how you achieve the attention quality and altitude control I talked about in week one.

I think about the information altitude you need as a CFO in four buckets:

Let's expand.

Some things you need to be able to recall at will. "Knowing your numbers" is a badge of honor for executives, especially CFOs. And rightly so.

It's not about showing off your memory, it is about responding quickly and demonstrating control.

Listen to an investor call where the CFO answers questions off the dome, versus one with the constant sound of papers shuffling and answers being read out. The impression is radically different.

But this is also where your capacity is most limited. You can't remember everything, so you need to be selective about what deserves space in your head.

For me, the characteristics were:

Let me give you a few examples.

As CFO, I always made sure I knew the underlying unit economics of our key business units off pat.

That gave me a frame for making quick commercial decisions and being directionally right most of the time. If someone suggested a growth initiative or product launch that would break those economics, I could shut it down before the organization wasted hours in spreadsheets trying to justify it.

Equally, if something was such an obvious winner, I wouldn't let the detailed workings slow us down. We'd greenlight it and let the analysis catch up.

There’d also be some must-know numbers; EBITDA for last year, this year, and next year by division, alongside the current year's CapEx and working capital numbers.

I needed them so often that it was like having a lo-fi, high-level 3 year cash flow forecast constantly running in my head. If I heard, felt, or smelled something that didn’t fit that picture, I knew it was time to bring the altitude right down and understand what was happening.

It probably sounds more clever than it was. Ask me for revenue from the previous quarter and I'd have to look it up. That was outside my ‘context window’.

Then there's information that lives in your head but doesn’t need to stay there long.

The current quarter's numbers were a good example. I'd have them programmed into my brain, but the minute the quarter closed, the earnings call was done, and the investor follow-ups were over?

Gone... vanished like they'd never been there.

Making room for the next lot.

After endless investor 1:1s, roadshows, and getting grilled on the numbers, knowing what I needed to have in my head became almost automatic. The important data points just got burnt into my brain, allowing me to answer questions on the fly.

But just as important was knowing what sat outside that window. I never wanted to guess. If something needed looking up, I looked it up.

Looking back, there were really three types of information I carried in my head.

Then there's the stuff you don't need to carry in your head, but you will need to to put your hands on quickly.

This is often information where the detail really matters. And there's far too much of it to memorize.

For me, the characteristics were:

This is essentially the role that CEO's lever-arch file played.

For me, it was a combination of crucial files and detailed financial information. Monthly management accounts, detailed forecast models, individual business unit strategies, the debt documents. That kind of stuff.

Then there were specific packs, notes or supporting materials I'd want close at hand for a particular meeting, discussion, or decision.

I couldn't recall much, if any, of that detail off the top of my head. But I knew where it was, and could get to it in minutes, if not seconds (normally electronically.)

Then there's the stuff you need to know about, but that doesn’t need to take up space in your head.

Some of this can be incredibly important. The difference is that you trust someone or something else to keep an eye on it and flag it when needed.

For me, the characteristics were:

If you're lucky enough to have a fabulous CAO or controller, your audit might well be here. Or a major systems implementation. Or an emerging issue in a business unit being handled by a divisional CFO.

And certainly the next level of detail in the financials would live here. You need to know the big picture and the headlines, but not necessarily much more than that.

This is where the quality of your team makes an enormous difference.

If your leadership team lacks strength and depth, or clear ownership, you'll feel compelled to carry far too much in buckets one and two.

And that eats into the mental capacity you need to be at your best.

Ultimately, it's about trusting something else to tell you when there's an issue. That might be a person, a reporting process, or a set of KPIs that alerts you when something starts going sideways.

You're giving yourself permission to be reminded, rather than having to remember.

And that only works if you trust your systems.

Note - this information is where AI has the most potential, to take everything that lives here, and effectively put it effectively into bucket 2. Meaning you can have ALL the information at your fingertips. (We’ll talk more next week.)

And finally, there's the stuff that simply doesn't deserve space in your head. Not everything needs to be remembered, monitored, followed up, or worried about.

That doesn't mean it's completely irrelevant. Just that you trust your system to bring it onto your radar if it becomes important enough.

For me, the characteristics were:

I see this as an exercise in giving yourself permission to ignore the enormous long tail of small things. Individually, they barely matter. Collectively, they can consume a huge amount of your mental capacity.

Here's a controversial one...

I actually put email in this bucket.

In my last role, I was getting around 500 emails a day.

Sure, I could have spent ages unsubscribing, filtering junk, and organizing my inbox. And I did every few months, but it became an evergrowing beast.

Instead, I approached it from the other direction. A quick daily scan to pick out anything important, and then I simply ignored the rest.

My CEO couldn't believe it. He was a lever-arch maximalist, but an inbox minimalist.

But I trusted my operating system to surface anything important. Anyone who really needed me knew that email wasn't getting my attention.

But most importantly, I'd decided that managing my inbox consumed a tremendous amount of mental energy. And the bandwidth required to keep it organized simply wasn't worth the benefit.

In the five years I operated this way, I can think of about three occasions when something slipped through that I'd have preferred to catch earlier.

None was particularly serious.

Meanwhile, five years of not stressing about staying on top of my inbox, and giving myself permission to ignore most of it, gave me a tremendous amount of headspace.

Not for everyone. But it worked for me.

Another example... the news. I stopped following the news about six or seven years ago (thank you, Daniel Priestley, for the tip).

Occasionally, it's embarrassing. Something huge has happened in the world and I've got absolutely no idea.

But far more often, I'm just happier, less distracted, and have a lot less unnecessary shit rattling around in my head (Note: My habit of doomscrolling mechanical watch repair videos is less healthy).

Of course, the hardest bit is that you need to keep shuffling information between the buckets.

Anyone who's lived through a proper business crisis knows how quickly these things come and go. Something can go from nowhere to dominating your entire brain, then straight back into the bin in the space of a few weeks. Days, even.

Developing the mental dexterity to do this is crucial. It's how you make room for what genuinely needs your attention.

A common mistake I see CFOs make is trying to keep too much close to hand and too much in their heads. Until eventually, they just kind of short-circuit.

I've seen more than my fair share of finance leaders burn out. And often I felt it was avoidable, if only they'd given themselves permission to be less close to everything.

I worked for one early in my career who fired off poorly written email replies well past midnight, every single day. Often to conversations they had absolutely no need to be involved in.

Perhaps that's where my own detachment from my inbox began!

But how much you have to carry, and where, isn't just about your brain. It's about your team.

The stronger your team, the more confidently you can rely on the latter two buckets, freeing up capacity in the first two.

I hate to be repetitive, but, by god, everything gets so much easier if you invest time in building a great team.

And as we'll discuss next week, AI radically changes the capacity of buckets two and three. Effectively acting as a tireless sweeper, helping you retrieve what matters and spot things you might otherwise miss, regardless of how big the ‘library’ is.

In the meantime, here is some homework to help you apply these principles to your own role:

In the first week, we talked about altitude control. Knowing when to operate at 35,000 feet and when to get down to 10 feet above the ground. The ability to move between those altitudes at will is a skill every executive, but especially every CFO, needs to master.

And knowing what information to carry in your head, what to keep close, and what to let go of is really altitude control in practice.

Get it right, and you free up the mental capacity to concentrate on the things that create and protect enterprise value (i.e. your real job).

Next week, I'll share the operating system I used as CFO, and how I'd adapt it for AI today. Spoiler: it looks very different.

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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.