The company outruns its finance function
Headcount, entities, and channels grow faster than the finance team can absorb. The function stays in transaction processing while the business needs decision support.
Who we serve
The Office of the CFO
The finance function at a $10M–$70M company does not need more headcount or another platform; it needs judgment applied through systems. Executive Advisory Systems builds the governed data layer, the financial expert systems on top of it, and the finance operating cadence that turns them into decisions.
The problems
What Actually Breaks at This Size
The recurring failures Executive Advisory Systems is built to answer in the office of the cfo.
The fifteen-day close
By the time the month is closed the information is stale enough to be history rather than a decision input. The close consumes the capacity that should be spent on analysis.
Forecast theater
The forecast is assembled from department wish-lists rather than drivers, and its error is never measured. Nobody can say how wrong it usually is, which means nobody can trust how wrong it is now.
Cash blindness during growth
Growth consumes cash and the bank balance is a lagging indicator. Without a rolling thirteen-week view maintained weekly, liquidity risk is discovered rather than managed.
Pricing and unit economics nobody owns
Margin by product, channel, and customer is not reliably computed, so pricing decisions are made on gut. The realized price differs from the list price in ways nobody has quantified.
The one-person dependency
The model, the mapping logic, and the institutional memory sit with one person. Their absence stops the reporting cycle, and diligence prices that risk.
The system
What F3 Insights Builds
Four layers, built bottom-up and consumed top-down. The governed data layer comes first: an expert system on unreconciled data is a faster way to be confidently wrong.
The governed data layer
One reconciled truth across accounting, CRM, and operational systems, with data contracts, lineage, and access. Non-negotiable and built first, because an expert system on unreconciled data is a faster way to be confidently wrong.
Financial expert systems
Driver-based forecasting, close acceleration, cash and runway instrumentation, unit economics, and scenario engines for tariff, rate, and demand shocks. Encoded expertise with explainable outputs and review gates, not a black box.
The finance ExOS
The weekly cash cadence, the monthly close and review, and the quarterly re-forecast, with standing agendas and named owners that make the systems produce decisions rather than reports.
Embedded fractional CFO leadership
A senior finance operator inside the cadence from day one, proving the system in live decisions rather than staged demos, then transferring it to the client's team.
Engagement
Diagnostic, Build, Operate, Transfer
Four phases. The client keeps the systems, the playbooks, and the data.
Diagnostic, weeks 2–6
Instrument reality: where the data actually lives, which numbers reconcile, how decisions really get made. Output is a systems map, a problem ledger with costs attached, and a sequenced build plan.
Build, months 1–4
Stand up the governed data layer, build the first expert systems and their review gates, and install the operating cadence. The advisor operates inside the cadence from day one.
Operate, months 3–9
The system runs the function's real rhythm. Your operators progressively take the controls; the advisor shifts from driving to reviewing.
Transfer, by design
Playbooks documented, operators certified on the gates, model review handed to named owners. You keep the capability, the code, the data, and the documentation.
Success is measured in your numbers, not consulting artifacts: days to close, forecast error, cash visibility, pipeline reconciled to the P&L, margin recovered. And your team running the system without us.
Related
The Rest of the System
Each office is one seat in the same operating system. The offices share one data layer, one cadence, and one set of playbooks.
Office of the CEOYou are the integration layer. Every decision routes through one calendar.Office of the COOThe company runs on tribal knowledge, and firefighting has become the operating model.Office of the CMOAttribution collapsed, and marketing cannot prove contribution to the CFO.Office of the CROThe forecast is a negotiation, and the pipeline number nobody fully believes.
Next step
Bring a systems answer to the CFO seat.
A diagnostic runs two to six weeks and ends with a systems map, a problem ledger with costs attached, and a sequenced build plan. Start with a conversation about the office of the cfo.