Finance Is Supposed to Know the Business. Somehow We Made That Optional

I started my career as a billing temp.

Not exactly the traditional origin story for a finance executive.

No investment banking.

No glamorous rotational program.

No dramatic montage involving Wall Street, three computer monitors and someone yelling about EBITDA.

I was billing people.

But one of the first things I remember doing was asking if I could see the warehouse.

I wanted to see the hardware.

I wanted to understand what we actually made, how it moved through the building and what happened before an invoice eventually landed on my desk.

That curiosity ended up getting the attention of the CFO.

Years later, I think I understand why.

I wasn’t really learning billing.

I was learning the business.

And I’ve become increasingly convinced that we’ve made this much more complicated than it needs to be.

We talk constantly about Finance becoming a “strategic business partner.”

There are conferences about it.

Frameworks.

Competency models.

Consulting decks.

Probably a maturity assessment with seventeen boxes and several attractive shades of blue.

But underneath all of it is something considerably less sophisticated:

Do you actually understand how the business works?

I was reminded of that recently while interviewing Gauri Tambe, Head of Finance & Accounting at Genezen, on FP&A Today. Gauri has spent more than 15 years in finance, but interestingly, she didn’t start there either. Her undergraduate degree was in pharmacy, and her career eventually brought those worlds together in cell and gene therapy.

Which made this conversation a little different for me personally.

My daughter has Pitt-Hopkins syndrome, a rare genetic disorder. I’ve spent more time than I ever expected reading about research, therapies and what science might someday be able to do for children like her. Gene therapy is one of those areas.

So I went into this interview interested in Finance.

But I also went into it as a mom.

Gauri works in a world where Finance isn’t supporting another software feature or deciding whether Marketing gets another $200,000.

The work happening around her can eventually help produce therapies that change people’s lives.

That changes the stakes a little.

And yet, weirdly enough, many of the finance lessons from our conversation apply to almost any company.

Maybe especially the boring ones.

Finance can’t understand the number without understanding what created it

Gauri’s world is obviously more complicated than most.

There are clinical trials.

Manufacturing capacity.

Regulatory requirements.

Quality controls.

Customer funding risk.

Contracts.

Supply chain.

And products where failure isn’t simply an unfavorable variance on page 14.

These products can eventually affect whether someone gets a therapy that changes their life.

So Finance can’t sit three floors away waiting for the monthly results.

Gauri put it pretty simply:

“I needed to know the business really well to be able to function as a good finance leader.”

That probably shouldn’t sound revolutionary.

It does anyway.

She described starting her finance career as a site business partner to a GM, learning what was happening in manufacturing and in the warehouse day to day.

That immediately took me back to being the billing temp asking to see the warehouse.

Different industries.

Same instinct.

Before you try to explain the economics, figure out what the company actually does all day.

And then Gauri gave me one of my favorite lines from the entire conversation.

She estimated her job was roughly:

“40%… running the numbers and reporting it” and “60%… influence.”

Influencing R&D.

Influencing Operations.

Influencing Supply Chain.

Helping people who don’t work in Finance understand the financial consequences of decisions they’re making every day.

That ratio probably won’t be right for every finance role.

But the idea is.

Because the further I’ve gotten in Finance, the less interested I’ve become in whether someone can produce the number.

I want to know whether they understand what created it.

The P&L is usually the end of the story

Finance has an unfortunate habit of meeting the business after everything interesting has already happened.

Revenue missed.

Great.

Let’s explain the variance.

Margin fell.

Wonderful.

Let’s build a bridge.

Working capital moved.

Someone fire up Excel.

By the time something reaches the P&L, however, the business has usually been trying to tell you about it for weeks.

Maybe Sales committed to something Operations couldn’t deliver.

Maybe a customer delayed.

Maybe capacity changed.

Maybe Quality was sitting on something that couldn’t be released.

Maybe Supply Chain knew about a constraint nobody bothered to mention in the forecast meeting.

The spreadsheet eventually finds out.

The business knew first.

One example from my conversation with Gauri made this beautifully obvious.

Sales might say they’re bringing in a certain amount of business.

Fantastic.

Everyone likes Sales at that particular moment.

Then someone talks to Operations.

Can we actually deliver it?

Do we have the capacity?

Do we have the resources?

Is Quality aligned?

Is Supply Chain aligned?

Suddenly the revenue forecast becomes slightly less theoretical.

Gauri described the problem this way:

“If Sales are saying, ‘I’m making 100 million bucks in opportunities this year,’ you need to have Operations aligned to have the capacity or the resources… to be able to deliver that.”

And then came the Finance part:

“It’s more or less Finance’s job to weave that in.”

That’s business partnering.

Not sending somebody a dashboard.

Finance belongs in those conversations because we’re one of the few functions forced to see how all those decisions eventually connect.

Not because Finance should control Sales.

Not because the CFO needs to become COO.

And definitely not because the company needs another recurring meeting.

Humanity has suffered enough.

Your forecast probably needs fewer finance people in the room and more business people

Here’s something I’ve learned to pay attention to.

When a forecast is wrong, Finance often starts with the model.

I increasingly start with the conversations.

Who knew something had changed?

When did they know?

Who did they tell?

And when did that information finally reach Finance?

Those questions can be considerably more useful than inspecting another formula.

Because a surprising amount of forecast accuracy is really information-flow accuracy.

If Operations knows capacity is constrained on Tuesday and FP&A learns about it three weeks later during the monthly forecast, I don’t have a modeling problem.

I have an organization problem.

This is why I like Finance people sitting close to the business.

Gauri has an FP&A person who sits very close to Operations and attends site huddles. When something changes, it can show up as a cost, cash or revenue risk in the weekly update rather than becoming an archaeological discovery at month-end.

One line from Gauri captures why:

“The pipeline context is everything.”

Yes.

The number without the context is just a number.

That’s not insight.

That’s arithmetic with a nicer font.

The annual budget is not a monitoring system

Another part of the conversation made me smile because Finance loves pretending these things are interchangeable.

Annual plan.

Quarterly forecast.

Monthly forecast.

Weekly flash.

13-week cash forecast.

They aren’t competing versions of the same spreadsheet.

They’re answering different questions.

The annual plan tells you where you’re trying to go.

The rolling forecast tells you how the outlook is changing.

The weekly flash tells you whether something important just moved.

And the 13-week cash forecast tells you whether you’re going to have an entirely different kind of meeting soon.

Gauri’s team uses all of them.

And when I asked why the weekly view mattered, she said:

“It’s the weekly stuff that really, really carries a lot of importance.”

Why?

Because waiting until the next monthly forecast can mean learning about an opportunity or risk too late. Cash is also monitored through a 13-week view because collections and vendor payments can move week to week.

I wouldn’t tell every company to suddenly start producing weekly flash reports.

Please don’t read this article and create four new recurring reports Monday morning.

That’s how Finance traditions begin.

The lesson is different.

Your reporting cadence should match the speed of the decisions you’re trying to make.

If the business changes weekly and Finance updates monthly, Finance is documenting history.

If the business changes quarterly and you’re making everyone update a forecast every Friday, Finance may simply be creating hobbies for itself.

Match the cadence to the decision.

Read the contract

This may be my favorite lesson because it doesn’t sound like FP&A advice.

Read the contract.

Finance people love the model.

We can spend hours debating whether an opportunity deserves a 60% probability or a 70% probability.

Meanwhile, several pages away from our beautiful probability-weighted forecast is an actual legal agreement explaining what happens when the customer cancels.

In gene therapy manufacturing, capacity is valuable.

If a customer reserves capacity and walks away, you can’t necessarily replace that revenue tomorrow.

So Gauri’s world uses protection mechanisms such as upfront payments and cancellation provisions that can change depending on how close a customer is to execution.

That’s not legal trivia.

That’s forecast architecture.

It affects revenue risk.

Cash.

Capacity.

Customer economics.

Potential downside.

Yet I’ve seen FP&A teams forecast contracts they’ve never read.

We know the probability in Salesforce to one decimal place.

We just don’t know what the customer actually agreed to.

Maybe we should reverse those priorities.

Probability is not certainty wearing a percentage sign

Genezen uses probabilities ranging roughly from 50% for shortlisted opportunities to 90% for opportunities near final contracting.

Not 100%.

Even near the finish line.

As Gauri put it:

“There’s always a 10% chance that something…”

Something happens.

That’s business.

Even when a contract looks nearly done, they still leave room for reality to come through the window and rearrange the furniture.

I wish Finance remembered this more often.

Somewhere along the way, putting 90% into a spreadsheet makes uncertainty look remarkably official.

Now it’s blue font.

It flows through six worksheets.

It appears on a chart.

Eventually someone puts it in PowerPoint.

By the executive meeting, 90% has somehow become destiny.

It isn’t.

It’s still someone’s judgment about an uncertain event.

The useful question isn’t whether your probability table looks sophisticated.

It’s whether you understand what could make the probability wrong.

That’s where scenario planning becomes useful.

Not:

Here are fourteen scenarios because Excel allows fourteen scenarios.

But:

Here are the two things that could materially change the outcome, here’s what we’d see first, and here’s what we’d do about it.

Much less impressive spreadsheet.

Much more useful Finance.

Finance is allowed to have a heart

This was probably the part of the conversation that meant the most to me personally.

Gene therapy is enormously expensive.

Some of the organizations trying to fund therapies for rare diseases aren’t giant pharmaceutical companies.

They’re foundations.

Sometimes parent-led foundations.

Gauri talked about how differently the economics can work in those situations.

In some cases, she said, foundation work may be discounted 80% or 90% compared with the true commercial price. The company may also absorb material costs it would normally pass through to a larger commercial customer.

From a spreadsheet perspective, that can look like terrible pricing.

From a human perspective, it’s something else entirely.

It’s a capital allocation decision that may help a therapy continue to exist.

And this is where the conversation stopped being theoretical for me.

My daughter has Pitt-Hopkins syndrome.

Parent-led organizations like the Pitt Hopkins Research Foundation exist because families aren’t particularly interested in waiting around politely for somebody else’s economic model to decide whether their children are worth researching.

They raise money.

They fund science.

They push.

They find partners.

And eventually those decisions meet companies where scientists, operations teams and, yes, Finance have to figure out how to make the economics work.

Toward the end of our conversation, I realized something.

A discount isn’t always just a discount.

Sometimes Finance is making a conscious decision to earn more somewhere else so the company can afford to say yes here.

That’s strategy.

And sometimes it’s also just being a decent human being.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Go look at the cash flow statement

Near the end of the interview, I asked Gauri what someone listening could take back to their finance team tomorrow.

I expected something complicated.

Maybe a framework for forecasting uncertainty.

Maybe something about probability-weighted pipeline.

Maybe a sophisticated approach to capacity planning.

Her advice was considerably less glamorous:

“Go look at your cash flow statement.”

Of course.

Finance spends enormous energy discussing profitability because profitability is intellectually satisfying.

Cash has considerably less patience for our theories.

Gauri’s point was that understanding the balance sheet and cash flow can expose where cash isn’t being used effectively.

Cash tells you whether customers are actually paying.

Whether working capital is consuming the business.

Whether growth requires more capital than expected.

Whether the economics underneath the P&L are actually functioning.

And sometimes the most useful financial analysis isn’t another analysis.

It’s noticing that the cash story and the P&L story don’t agree.

The teachable part

If I were advising someone trying to become better at FP&A, I wouldn’t start by telling them to learn another financial-modeling technique.

I’d give them a slightly stranger assignment.

Pick one number you own.

Revenue.

Gross margin.

Headcount.

Inventory.

Whatever.

Then walk backward until you reach the actual business activity creating it.

Talk to the person doing the work.

Watch the process.

Read the contract.

Understand the handoff.

Ask what breaks.

Ask what happens when volume doubles.

Ask what customers complain about.

Ask which assumption everyone quietly knows is nonsense.

Then go back to your model.

You’ll probably look at it differently.

Gauri said something near the end of our interview that probably summarizes this entire article better than I can:

“To be a good finance professional, you have to first be a good business professional.”

That’s the golden nugget.

Not a new FP&A framework.

Not another system.

Not another certification.

Learn the business.

I think that’s what I was doing years ago when I walked into that warehouse.

I didn’t know enough at the time to call it “business partnering.”

I just wanted to understand what happened before the invoice.

Maybe we didn’t need a name for it.

Maybe Finance was always supposed to work this way.

We just spent enough years staring at spreadsheets that eventually someone had to remind us.

And I’m glad Gauri Tambe did.

For anyone who wants to connect with Gauri after reading this, her LinkedIn profile is here: Gauri Tambe on LinkedIn.