I talk to a lot of finance leaders, and lately I keep hearing a version of the same thing. They have more data than ever, more tools than they know what to do with, and now AI on top of all of it. On paper, that should make the job easier. In practice, it creates a lot more work. And it can be a problem.
The challenge finance teams face right now has nothing to do with scarcity; there’s more of everything, and the hard part is deciding what deserves attention and what should be let go. That’s what I wanted to dig into for the first episode of our series. I sat down with Chris Sands, CFO at InvoiceCloud, and Ricky Motschwiller, VP of Finance at Abcuro, and the conversation strengthened a few opinions I’ve been thinking of for a while. Here’s what I walked away with.
Finance keeps getting handed more, with no more hours to do it
I opened by asking Chris whether so much data, applications, and information actually make the job harder or if he ever feels like he’s not in control. His answer went somewhere I didn’t expect. He doesn’t see the job of finance as being “in control of the business” in the first place. When his peers call it “your budget” as if it belongs to him, he corrects them. It’s the business’s budget. His team builds it and reports against it, but the business owns it. That distinction matters more than it sounds, because a lot of the pressure finance leaders carry comes from a quiet belief that they’re supposed to have their hands on the wheel of everything the numbers touch. Letting go of that belief frees you up to focus on the part of the job that is yours and yours alone.
What is undeniably true is the scope of the role keeps expanding. What finance leaders do is more complex than ever, and FP&A is heavier because of the volume of data and the expectations that come with it. Ricky put the sharpest point on it: finance is expected to know more than ever, while the busy work grows faster than the strategic work. That gap is what wears teams down, and no new tool has closed it. If anything, the tools have widened it.
Just because you can produce it doesn’t mean it’s worth producing
The idea from Ricky that stuck with me came up before we even started recording, and I wrote it down. We’re using these tools to produce more output, he said, without stopping to ask whether the output was worth producing in the first place.
His example was regulatory disclosures. Look at what goes into a 10-K today versus fifteen years ago and there’s far more of it, but in his experience much of it doesn’t move the market. Nobody reads a new disclosure and reprices the stock. Technology makes producing work easier than ever, the volume climbs, and no one asks whether it matters.
This is the trap finance leaders should notice, because it’s invisible while it’s happening. When work production gets cheap, output starts to feel like value even when it creates none. AI makes it effortless to generate the memo, the deck, the extra cut of the analysis, which means the real discipline is no longer producing the work. It’s deciding what deserves to exist at all. Finance should be the function asking that question, and most teams have never built the muscle for it.
Prioritization is the real struggle that finance leaders wrestle with
So how do you manage the increased workload due to data and systems overload? Chris’s answer was relentless prioritization, and I want to sit on this because I think it’s the whole game and it’s badly underrated.
Almost every instinct in a finance team points toward addition. Add the report, the tool, the process, the headcount. What Chris described is the opposite. He keeps a constantly reworked list of what actually matters and, more importantly, is willing to tell his team what to stop doing when they’re underwater. That act, telling a capable person that something on their plate doesn’t need to happen, is one of the hardest things a leader does, because everything on the list looks at least a little important.
Here’s my take. The finance leaders who thrive over the next few years won’t be the ones who adopt the most or produce the most. They’ll be the ones who get good at subtraction. Saying no to a report the board glances at once a quarter. Killing a process that exists only because it always has. Passing on a shiny capability that doesn’t move the business. When technology can do presumably anything and everything, the ability to deliberately do less becomes a real competitive advantage; teams who prioritize the truly important things and automate the grunt work will end up operating sharper and faster than their peers, instead of getting further behind completing a task-list of immeasurable ROI.
Lots of systems, landmines, and app switching
The complexity is real when it comes to the number of systems finance leaders implement and use. Ricky counted the systems his team touches every month and ran out of fingers past ten. Different data, different logins, and the constant worry that they aren’t telling the same story. Only a few years ago, Harvard Business Review measured how often employees switch between applications in a workday and found it was around 3,600 times, and it has only gotten worse since.
What made his point more than a tool count were the traps hiding inside it. He described two systems his team will eventually have to rip out, one because the vendor won’t service public companies and one because it can’t handle the compliance that arrives once a biotech starts selling an approved drug. You don’t see those landmines when you buy the tool, but you end up stepping on them years later. A CFO, as Chris put it, has to be dangerous enough to see around those corners and let a future ambition like going public shape the systems you choose today. That’s a real skill for finance leaders to develop.
Beyond the number of systems, when a team does need more capability, the question I care about most is whether it adds to the complexity or builds on the ground they already stand on. This is the part I spend my days thinking about at Charted, and my honest view is the teams who stay more productive treat their core platform as exactly that. When a new capability lives inside the system you already run on, you get to subtract from the complexity. When that same capability lives in yet another disconnected tool, you’ve just added an eleventh thing that now has to agree with the other ten.
AI is a great assistant, with adult supervision
Reviewing a handful of AI statistics, including Deloitte’s finding that most CFOs call AI critical, while only about a fifth think it’s delivered real value, was met with varied responses. Chris’s reaction was that all of it can be true at once. The technology will be transformational, the coverage is sensational, and the finance use cases are still emerging. Even at his aggressively AI-forward company, they lagged well behind engineering and sales through 2025, and that’s only now shifting.
Where they were both clear-eyed was trust, and Ricky’s story said it best. He fed AI a fifty-page financial statement and asked it to check for internal consistency. He already knew there was an error. The AI missed it, and when he pointed to the exact pages, it apologized. If a person did that, he said, you’d stop trusting them. Chris framed the why of it cleanly: most of finance is deterministic and these models are probabilistic, so ninety percent right doesn’t clear the bar for a journal entry the way it might for customer service.
But both of them use AI as a genuine accelerator, and their framing is the one I’d hold onto. Let it produce the first draft and catch the obvious ten things wrong, so your review takes half the time. You still own the work. The teams that win with AI will be the ones who keep their judgment firmly in the loop while everyone else quietly outsources theirs.
The final takeaway
When I asked for one closing piece of advice, Chris’s answer stuck with me. You’re not going to conquer the complexity. The scope keeps growing and the environment stays dynamic, so the goal was never to beat it. The goal is to manage it well, prioritize relentlessly, and set honest expectations for yourself and your team.
That’s the real state of finance right now. There’s more of everything, and the teams pulling ahead aren’t adopting the most or producing the most. They have the discipline to focus on what matters and the confidence to keep their own judgment in charge.
This was the first of several conversations I’ve been having with finance leaders about the things they really wrestle with, and we have more coming soon. If you’re a CFO or senior finance leader who’d want to be part of one, I’d love to hear from you.
To watch our full conversation, view it on YouTube here.
