Finance: Workflows
How money and financial truth move through the company, and the handoffs with Sales, PMO, DevOps, HR and Legal.
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What arrives#
| From | What | Becomes |
|---|---|---|
| Sales | Signed contracts and pipeline | Revenue forecast, and the commitments we now owe |
| PMO | Project progress and effort | Project cost, and margin |
| DevOps | Cloud and infrastructure spend | The fastest-moving cost line in most technology companies |
| HR | Headcount and payroll | The largest and most predictable cost |
| Suppliers | Invoices | A three-way match, then a human approval |
| Legal | Contractual obligations | Committed but unspent, which is the missing term in most runway calculations |
The Legal row is the one that gets forgotten, and it is why runway is routinely overstated. A signed three-year commitment is not a future cost, it is a present obligation that has not yet moved through the bank.
What leaves#
| To | What |
|---|---|
| CEO | Runway, margin, forecast, and the three questions answered |
| PMO | Project margin, monthly rather than at closure |
| Every function | Budget, and where they are against it |
| Sales | Pricing floors and the discount band |
| DevOps | The scaling ceiling, which is what makes automated scaling safe |
| Suppliers | Payment, on time |
The two paths#
Handoff contracts#
With Sales. Finance sets the discount band and the pricing floor; inside it, sellers decide without asking. A band nobody knows produces either constant escalation or quiet breaches.
With the PMO. Project margin monthly, not at closure. A losing project spotted in month two can be renegotiated, rescoped or stopped. The same project at closure is only a lesson.
With DevOps. Finance sets the automated scaling ceiling. This is what makes automated scaling safe: an agent may spend freely below a number a person chose, and never above it.
With HR. Headcount is the largest cost and the least reversible. Any change goes through both functions, and hiring plans are costed before they are announced.
With Legal. Every signed obligation becomes a committed-spend line the day it is signed rather than the day it is invoiced.
Cadence#
| Weekly | Cash, receivables ageing, anomalies |
| Per cycle | Payment run, with its two approvals |
| Monthly | Close, project margins, runway including commitments, control checks |
| Quarterly | Forecast recalibration, pricing review |
The failure this design is built against#
Two, and only one of them is dramatic.
The dramatic one is an automated payment path that a well-written email can aim at an attacker's account. That is what the release-by-a-person rule and the out-of-band bank verification exist for.
The quiet one is a company that is profitable on paper and runs out of cash, because runway was calculated without commitments, a project was losing money for five months before anyone measured it, and collections were forecast at terms rather than at the rate customers actually pay.