I’m going to be brutally honest about something most CEOs won’t say out loud:

I don’t need my CFO to be a better accountant.

I need them to be a better fortune teller.

Let me explain what I mean—because this gap between what CEOs need and what CFOs can actually deliver is quietly destroying mid-market companies.

What Keeps Me Up At Night

As a CEO, here’s what I’m actually worried about at 2 AM:

Not whether last quarter’s numbers are accurate. I assume they are.

Not whether we’ll close the books on time. That’s table stakes.

What keeps me up is whether we’re about to walk into a wall I can’t see yet.

Is our customer concentration becoming dangerous? Are we burning cash faster than our model assumes? Is there a leading indicator flashing red that we’re all missing because we’re focused on lagging indicators?

I need my CFO to see around corners. To spot the pattern before it becomes a problem. To tell me what’s fragile in our business model before the market tests it.

But here’s the frustrating reality: most CFOs can’t do this. Not because they’re not smart enough or experienced enough.

Because they’re too buried in the tactical work of financial management to have any capacity for strategic foresight.

The Partnership I Look For

Let me paint a picture of what I need from my finance leader.

I need someone who can sit in a strategy meeting and immediately pressure-test ideas with numbers. Not “let me model that and get back to you next week”—I need real-time pushback when something doesn’t pencil out.

I need someone who brings me problems before they show up in the P&L. Who can say, “we’re tracking to plan, but here are three things that make me nervous about Q3.”

I need someone who can tell me what happens to our business model if revenue comes in 20% light, or if our largest customer churns, or if we have to extend our sales cycle by two months. And I need those answers in minutes, not days.

I need a strategic sparring partner who understands the business well enough to challenge my assumptions. Who has the credibility to tell me when I’m being too optimistic or too conservative.

Most importantly, I need someone who can help me make better decisions faster—because in today’s market, the speed of decision-making is often more important than the perfection of decision-making.

That’s the type of CFO I look for. That’s the partnership I need.

The Infrastructure Problem Nobody Wants To Acknowledge

Here’s what actually happens in most mid-market companies:

I hire a talented CFO. Someone with great experience, sharp business instincts, and genuine strategic capability.

And then I watch that capability get buried under an avalanche of manual financial processes.

They spend their first month just trying to understand how our financial systems (loosely speaking) connect. Where the data lives. Which spreadsheets are the “source of truth”. How the budget process actually works versus how it’s supposed to work.

They spend the next three months firefighting. Fixing broken formulas. Reconciling inconsistencies between departmental budgets. Building workarounds for systems that don’t talk to each other.

And before long, they’re spending 60-70% of their time on work that, frankly, computers should be doing.

They’re still sharp. They still have good instincts. But they don’t have time to apply those instincts strategically.

So when I ask “what happens if we accelerate our product roadmap by six months?”—I get “that’s a great question, let me build that scenario and get back to you.”

And the strategic conversation dies right there.

The AI Temptation (And Why It’s Not The Answer)

I know what some of you are thinking: “Just implement AI. It’ll automate all that grunt work and free up your CFO to be strategic.”

I wish it were that simple.

Look, I’m bullish on AI. I think it will transform financial planning eventually. But right now, we’re in this awkward middle period where AI can help with pieces of the problem—but it’s not a replacement for solid financial infrastructure.

Here’s why: AI models are probabilistic. They make educated guesses. And financial planning requires deterministic accuracy.

I cannot walk into a board meeting with forecasts that are “probably right.” I cannot make acquisition decisions based on models that might have hallucinated a formula. I cannot bet the company on outputs I can’t fully validate.

The human judgment component of financial planning isn’t getting less important with AI—it’s getting more important. Because someone still needs to:

  • Validate that AI outputs actually make business sense
  • Catch the subtle errors that look right but aren’t
  • Understand the context that makes certain scenarios plausible and others nonsense
  • Make the strategic calls that no algorithm can make

But here’s the catch: that human judgment requires time and cognitive capacity. And if my CFO is spending all their time on manual consolidation and error-checking, they don’t have that capacity—even with AI assistance.

What’s Actually Stopping Strategic Finance

Let me be specific about what prevents my CFO from being the strategic partner I need:

Time scarcity. When you’re spending 15 hours a week on manual data aggregation, you don’t have time to think about what the data means. You’re in execution mode, not analysis mode.

System fragmentation. When your financial data lives in six different places, and you’re manually stitching it together every month, you can’t do dynamic analysis. You can’t quickly answer “what if” questions. You’re stuck building one-off models for every scenario.

Lack of real-time visibility. When you’re working with static monthly snapshots, you can’t spot trends as they’re emerging. You can’t see the early warning signs. By the time something shows up in your monthly variance report, it’s already too late to be proactive about it.

Credibility erosion. When you have to say “let me get back to you” three times in a single meeting, people stop asking for your input. They start making assumptions without you. You get relegated from decision-maker to decision-documenter.

And here’s what kills me about all this: none of these barriers has anything to do with the CFO’s capability.

They’re all infrastructure problems.

What I’ve Learned Running A Company

I’ve been leading companies long enough to recognize a pattern:

The CFOs who operate as true strategic partners—who have real influence, who drive decisions, who see problems before they become crises—all have something in common.

It’s not that they’re smarter. It’s not that they have better intuition. It’s not that they work longer hours.

It’s that they have infrastructure that supports strategic thinking.

They have systems where they can model scenarios in real-time without rebuilding everything from scratch.

They have visibility into the business that lets them spot trends as they’re forming, not after they’ve already impacted results.

They have automated enough of the tactical work that they actually have time to think strategically.

And because they have that capacity, they can do what I actually need them to do: help me make better decisions faster.

The CFOs who don’t have this infrastructure? They work just as hard. They’re just as talented. But they’re constantly playing catch-up. Always reacting, never anticipating.

And honestly, it’s not fair to them. We’re asking them to do strategic work while forcing them to use tactical tools.

The Choice Every CEO Needs To Make

Here’s where most CEOs get stuck:

They keep asking their CFO to be more strategic. They invite them to more meetings. They request more forward-looking analysis. They talk about wanting finance to have “a seat at the table.”

But they never address the fundamental constraint: their CFO doesn’t have the time or tools to be strategic.

You can’t mandate strategic thinking. You can’t performance-review your way to strategic partnership. You can’t inspire someone into having more hours in the day.

What you can do is fix the infrastructure that’s preventing them from applying their full capability.

And this requires a mindset shift that most CEOs resist: you need to think about financial planning infrastructure as a strategic investment, not an operational expense.

Because here’s the truth: every day your CFO spends doing work computers should do is a day they’re not doing work that could transform your business.

Every strategic question that takes three days to answer instead of three minutes is a decision you’re making with incomplete information.

Every time your CFO can’t provide real-time insight, you’re flying blind when you should have instrumentation.

What I Actually Need

Let me bring this full circle.

As a CEO, here’s what I need from my CFO:

I need them to have enough capacity to be genuinely curious about the business. To ask questions, not just answer them. To explore what-ifs, not just report what-is.

I need them to be able to respond at the speed of strategy, not the speed of spreadsheets.

I need them to have the credibility that comes from consistently delivering insights when decisions are actually being made—not three days later when the decision’s already been made without them.

I need them to see patterns I’m missing. To challenge assumptions I’m making. To tell me when I’m wrong before it costs us.

But none of that happens if they’re buried in manual work. None of that happens if their tools don’t support dynamic analysis. None of that happens if I keep demanding strategic thinking while accepting tactical infrastructure.

The question every CEO needs to ask isn’t “why isn’t my CFO more strategic?”

It’s “What infrastructure problems are preventing my CFO from being strategic?”

Because I guarantee you—the capability is there.

The capacity isn’t.

And that’s a choice you’re making, whether you realize it or not.

About the Author:

Paul Lynch is CEO of Centage, where he spends most of his time talking to CFOs who are exhausted from being told to “think more strategically” while drowning in Excel. Before Centage, he watched this pattern play out across multiple high-growth companies—brilliant finance leaders buried under manual processes. He’s on a mission to fix the infrastructure problem that’s holding strategic finance back. Find him on LinkedIn where he writes about the real challenges finance leaders face.

Written in partnership with Tom White