Aaron Levine is the CFO of Prophix.
Every cycle, finance leaders get the same requests from the board. “We need these numbers faster.” And every time, finance teams look to more automation, another platform or better dashboards that promise real-time everything.
But the close still drags, and reporting still lags while the business still waits.
That pattern indicates that the problem was never speed. In my experience, the finance leaders who have pulled ahead of their peers made a fundamentally different decision about the structure of their finance function, and speed took care of itself.
If you’re still chasing speed, you’re solving the wrong problem.
Speed Is A Symptom
Speed in finance is really about the time between something happening in the business and the right person having a clear, trustworthy understanding of what it means.
When you reduce speed to a reporting problem, you naturally look for faster tools, but faster outputs don’t necessarily lead to faster decisions when the underlying structure is broken. All you get is a slightly faster version of the same bottleneck.
A business unit leader needs to understand why a margin is compressing in one region. In a tool-driven finance function, that question enters a queue. An analyst pulls data, builds the view, formats the output and sends it back two days later, if you’re lucky. By then, the decision had been made without it, or was delayed waiting for it. The tool didn’t cause the delay; the structure did.
You can’t optimize directly for speed; it’s the outcome of a correctly designed operating model.
The Real Bottleneck: Finance As An Intermediary
Most finance functions were intentionally designed to be intermediaries because it was the only viable model when data lived in disconnected systems, and someone had to manually interpret raw numbers and translate them into a decision-ready answer. That strategy has a ceiling that most mid-market finance teams hit years ago.
To break through this, stop owning the answer and start owning the foundation the answer runs on. That way, the business gets current, trusted financial intelligence directly without routing a request through the team. Finance stops being the last mile of every data question and becomes the architecture that makes it possible to get the answer in the first place.
That shift allows the team’s judgment to be used for decisions that actually require it (such as capital allocation, scenario planning and margin analysis), instead of being absorbed by the work of producing inputs. Your finance team then moves from serving requests to shaping outcomes.
Look at it as a structural decision, not a technology one.
The Problem: The Close, The Plan And The Report Are Three Different Numbers
In most finance functions, planning, close and reporting run as three separate processes, sequentially, with handoffs between them. That design automatically introduces lag, reconciliation overhead and version control problems, and it produces the familiar situation where the plan, the close and what leadership sees are three slightly different numbers that someone has to manually align. Adding a tool on top of this structure complicates the problem without solving the underlying issue.
Collapsing these into a single cycle, where planning, close and reporting are interconnected, allows organizations to move faster. Once you have one unified source of data, the inefficiency vanishes, and that’s the difference between a finance function that’s a bottleneck and one that’s a force multiplier.
Why More Technology Doesn’t Equal More Speed
If the structural issues are so clear, why do organizations keep investing in technology without seeing results? In my opinion, there are two reasons.
The first is that they’re solving symptoms, not causes. The symptoms of slow reporting, long close cycles and overwhelmed teams are visible. The cause, an operating model that was never designed to scale, is harder to confront. Adding tools on top of that model doesn’t change the structure, and in many cases, it adds work (new integrations, new workflows, new complexity) that falls back on the finance team. Capacity increases, but so does the burden.
The second reason, and this one is underappreciated, is trust. Faster results are only valuable if the team can stand behind them. When a CFO takes a number into a board meeting or regulatory review, they need to explain where it came from and why it’s right. If the answer is “the dashboard generated it” or “AI summarized it,” that’s not an answer. Speed without a traceable, auditable foundation is a risk.
Most technology investments solve the first problem while entirely ignoring the second.
The Question That Changes The Decision
The finance functions that have broken this pattern started with the question, “What should our team never have to do again?”
That question matters because it reorients the entire decision. Most technology investments are additive. They give you a new capability, and you build value on top of it. But the leaders who are restructuring their finance teams looked at it from a different angle. They mapped out where their team’s hours are going and were honest about what they found. A significant portion of time goes to work that requires little strategic capacity, such as data pulls, report formatting or answering the same three questions every close cycle.
The structural decision is to remove that work entirely from the team layer, not accelerate it or automate it, but design it out of the team’s responsibilities entirely, so their capacity is focused on decisions that require them.
Restructuring your finance function shouldn’t begin with an extensive transformation initiative. Instead, I’d begin by asking, “What has to happen before my team can do anything else?” and then systematically remove it.
Structure Is The Lever
The CFOs who have made the shift arrived there through a clarity of purpose about what the finance function is actually for, and built their operating model around that answer.
The practical significance is clear, even if the execution isn’t. Stop adding to the system and start deducting from it. Every process that has to go through your team before the business gets an answer is a structural cost. Every piece of institutional logic living in a spreadsheet or in someone’s head is a fragility waiting to be revealed. The winning operating model is the one designed to eliminate those costs. That’s a leadership decision.
This isn’t about moving faster for the sake of speed. It’s about changing the work itself.
When the structure is right, speed follows naturally.
Forbes Finance Council is an invitation-only organization for executives in successful accounting, financial planning and wealth management firms. Do I qualify?