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How to Diagnose an EBITDA Miss: A CFO Variance Analysis Framework
Walk the EBITDA miss backwards through the variance waterfall. Revenue, gross margin, labor hours, wage rate, overtime, productivity. The 4 places you find the real story.
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Strategic Sourcing for Middle-Market Companies: Where CFOs Should Look First
How to find EBITDA hiding in fragmented middle-market spend. The 8-step framework, category-attractiveness table, and the three categories that pay for the whole exercise.
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A Practical Monthly Finance Cadence for PE-Backed Portfolio Companies
What actually happens WD1 through WD10 at a PE-backed portfolio company. Timeline, owner, output, and the mistakes that break the cadence in year one.
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The 2026 AI-Native CFO Job Description (Long Form)
TL;DR: The 2026 CFO role is not the 2019 role with “AI” bolted on. Below is a full copy-paste JD, salary and equity by company stage, an AI-fluency checklist that actually filters candidates, and five questions to ask the hiring board that will tell you whether the seat is worth…
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The KPI Dashboard That Actually Gets Read: 8 Metrics, One Page
TL;DR: Eight metrics on one page, refreshed weekly, with sparkline plus variance to plan plus variance to prior period. That is the dashboard people actually read. Everything else is decoration. If your dashboard has 30 metrics, it has zero readers. The reason most finance dashboards fail is not the tool.…
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Scenario Planning for Operating CFOs: Base, Upside, Downside Without the Theater
TL;DR: Skip the 4-quadrant strategy-consulting scenario deck. Run three scenarios (base 60 percent, upside 20 percent, downside 20 percent), sensitize 3 to 5 variables that actually move the P&L, put them on one page, and update after every quarter close. Sponsors and boards use this. They do not use 40-tab…
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Rolling Forecasts vs Annual Budgets: When to Switch and How to Actually Do It
TL;DR: Rolling forecasts win when your business changes faster than the calendar year. They lose when nothing material has changed in six months and your team is already stretched. Below is what to actually build, when to switch, and the three things that kill rolling forecasts in year one. Most…
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6 Things You Should NEVER Ask an LLM as a CFO
TL;DR Every CFO should have a mental “do not ask” list for LLMs. It is not about being paranoid. It is about knowing where the model is confidently wrong or where the tool is a legal liability. Below are six categories that have burned people I know, with the failure…
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The AI-Assisted CFO Weekly Cadence: Monday Through Friday
TL;DR A finance week has five distinct modes: review, prep, pulse, deep work, and wrap. AI helps most when you match the tool to the mode instead of trying to “use AI more” as a general goal. Below is a Monday-through-Friday operating rhythm with the specific prompt to run each…
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AI-Generated Investor Updates: A Templated Prompt That Sponsors Actually Respect
TL;DR Sponsors read the first paragraph and the asks. Everything else is skimmed. Below is the exact monthly update prompt I have used to generate first drafts that partners forwarded to their IC without meaningful edits. The prompt is 90% of the value. The edit pass is where you strip…
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Custom GPT vs Claude Project vs Copilot Agent: Which Fits Your Finance Workflow
TL;DR Claude Projects win for long-form reasoning over a big file set (QoE, budget narratives, board writeups). Custom GPTs win when you need a shareable, single-purpose tool for a repeat workflow (invoice coding, expense triage). Copilot Agents win when your data lives in Excel, SharePoint, and Outlook and you cannot…
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Build Your Board Deck with AI: The 6-Prompt Playbook
TL;DR Six prompts. Copy them in order. Feed a P&L export, a cash file, a Slack digest, and a plan. You get a board-ready deck draft in about 45 minutes instead of two days. You still edit the numbers, own the narrative, and cut the caveats. Everything below is what…
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The Pragmatic CFO 