Finance Manager

A company of ten people has nobody dedicated to money. The founder holds the corporate card, an outside accounting firm handles tax filings, and whether a payment arrived is something the founder checks in a banking app. That arrangement works for a while.

The point where it breaks tends to look the same everywhere. Half the thirty charges on the card statement are a mystery to everyone, and reconciling them eats half a day of the founder's month-end. A customer who signed a contract never got an invoice, so their payment is two months late, and that fact surfaces by accident while someone is looking at the bank balance. Then an investor asks for monthly revenue and costs across the last six months, and producing that file takes two weeks.

What these have in common is that nobody did anything wrong. Everyone did their own job; there was simply no one looking at the movement of money in one place. The finance manager exists to hold that seat — connecting the accounting that was sent outside with the spending happening inside, and keeping the bank account and the ledger pointed at the same number.

The day starts with the bank balance. Yesterday's deposits and withdrawals get matched against the ledger, and anything unexpected gets traced right then.

1. Review spending approvals. Purchase requests and card charges from each team are checked against their budget lines, and anything missing documentation goes back. Whatever isn't filtered here becomes thirty items to dig through at month-end.
2. Chase money coming in. Contracts due to be invoiced this week get invoiced, and anyone past their payment date gets a call. This is where the role touches billing operations, the work of handling different plans and billing dates for every customer.
3. Schedule money going out. Payroll, social insurance, rent, and subscriptions to tools all have fixed dates, so they go on a calendar and the balance for those dates gets checked in advance.
4. Close the month. A month of transactions is categorized and sent to the accounting firm, and what comes back is turned into the company's numbers. The result becomes the financial statements — what was earned, what is owned and owed, and how cash actually moved, one page each.
5. Count the remaining time. How much leaves each month, and how many months the balance lasts at that rate. This cash management number is the one the role reports to the founder most often.

Some work arrives quarterly or annually: preparing VAT filings, closing the corporate tax year, and assembling whatever a potential investor asks for once diligence begins.

The role doesn't finish anything alone. It touches nearly every team at least once a month.

1. The founder or the chief financial officer (CFO). The first person to receive the finished numbers. Decisions like how many people can be hired and when fundraising should start come from there, and the raw material for those decisions is the table this role builds.
2. The outside accounting firm, or an in-house accountant. Transaction data goes out every month and a clean ledger comes back. They're the person you talk to most often about transactions whose category isn't obvious.
3. Team leads. Spending over budget, charges without receipts, a tool subscription that suddenly doubled. Because this conversation gets tiring on both sides, most teams agree on a limit up front and only the overages get discussed.
4. Sales and customer success. Where contract terms meet incoming cash. A deal with a shifted billing date or an attached discount changes the shape of the invoice, so it has to be known before signing, not after.
5. People operations. Payroll calculations, settlements when someone joins or leaves, and the headcount cost plan as the team grows.
6. Banks and investors. Checking loan terms, and preparing requested material once an investment review starts.

"We have a heavy month going out, so please hold that payment until after the 25th."

Given the cash calendar, large outflows can't be allowed to stack up before a certain date.

"That contract was never invoiced. Send me a copy and I'll issue it today."

Money the company is owed is stuck at the billing step.

"At this burn rate we have eight months of runway."

The remaining time, calculated from monthly outflow and the current balance.

Pagedeck created this seat when headcount passed thirty. Until then Grace was watching the bank account herself, and once the customer count went past 200, simply tracking who had paid took a full day. Two months after the hire, the finding was seventeen accounts with failed payments that nobody had noticed. That was $7,000 leaving every month, uncounted.

Sofia now talks to this person before settling contract terms. Offering ten percent off for a year paid up front is good news for the bank account, but it changes how the revenue gets recorded. Collecting $9,000 in January still leaves January's revenue at $750, with the rest booked as an obligation for service not yet delivered.

The most common reading is that this is the person who tells you to spend less. It looks that way, since the job involves sending approvals back and pointing out that a budget was exceeded. What the role actually protects is not the total but predictability — money going where it was planned, in the amount planned, and showing up in the records on time. Treat the role as a cost-cutter and teams start routing around approvals with personal cards and reimbursements, at which point the numbers this person produces stop matching reality.

Treating the monthly close as data entry is the other mistake, because sorting receipts is what it looks like from the outside. What actually takes the time is judgment, not sorting. Whether a cost belongs to this month or next, and how an annual prepayment gets spread across months as revenue, are decided every cycle, and those decisions accumulate into the numbers an investor will read. Postponing them as clerical work creates six months of corrections to unwind at once.