A day in the life of a CFO
A top CFO just shared what he does all day. Inside the office and after it.
READ TIME: 9 MINUTES
I sat down with a secret CFO who’s run finance inside multinational businesses, from $400M to multi-billion. I asked him a question everyone asks, and everyone answers badly:
What does a CFO actually do all day?
He laughed.
Then he said the most honest thing I’ve heard in a while:
It’s a race through meetings.
Three one-on-ones before noon. Sometimes six. Then another set. And in between? You’re absorbing. Pressure, people and misalignment.
The pressure doesn’t end at 5pm. It follows you home through dinner, workouts, and conversations with your wife, your girlfriend, your kids, or whoever is waiting for you on the other side of the day.
That’s the CFO job.
So this isn’t a day in the life of a CFO piece to entertain you.
It’s a truthful time-based breakdown of what fills the CFO calendar and the part most people miss: Why the day looks boring… but the role is not easy. And where AI actually fits.
Let’s walk through the day.
7:00 AM
The day doesn’t start with panic.
You imagine a CFO waking up, opening their phone, checking cash, checking burn, and checking runway. I don’t wake up with that gut feeling of what if something went wrong overnight. Nope.
Most businesses don’t explode overnight.
I don’t wake up at 7am and check cash.
Cash is not magic. It’s booked by humans.
Bank statements come in.
Transactions get mapped.
Entries get posted.
Then the cash position becomes real enough to look at.
So what does the CFO actually do in the morning?
It’s basic, but it has everything:
Check if anything urgent came in (US / Australia / late time zones).
Check if the CEO messaged.
Check the agenda.
Identify the one meeting that can’t be fumbled.
That’s the real morning.
Not dashboards.
Calendar + preparation.
8:30 AM
The real CFO operating system is the agenda.
Most CFOs don’t design their day. They survive it. Because the agenda is already booked. Head of AP. Head of Tax. Head of Treasury. Investor. CEO.
The CFO doesn’t wake up and decide, today I’ll do strategy. The CFO wakes up and sees that today belongs to other people.
The cadence is predictable.
Weekly one-on-ones happen at fixed slots:
Monday 1pm
Tuesday 9am
Thursday 2pm
Those blocks don’t disappear.
Then the few open slots get filled by everything else:
Escalations.
Ad hoc questions.
Last-minute meetings.
Problems nobody wants to own.
This is why CFOs feel like they’re constantly busy but rarely productive.
9:00 AM
What CFO meetings are actually about.
If you think CFO meetings are about numbers, you’ve never sat in one.
Yes, the calendar is for one-on-ones. But the content is human.
People come in with:
Frustration.
Complaints.
Emotion.
“This person isn’t fair.”
“Sales is asking unrealistic things.”
“Finance is blocking us.”
And the CFO becomes an adult in the room.
People are angry, people are emotional, people are complaining… and a CFO must listen and try to get to a solution.
This is the part AI doesn’t replace.
You can’t automate trust.
You can’t automate leadership.
You can’t automate conflict resolution.
That’s why the day looks boring…but the role is not easy.
10:30 AM
Meeting the CEO
The CFO doesn’t spend the day in panic mode with the CEO. In healthy companies, it’s more like a constant touchpoint:
If you have a great relationship, you call each other twice a day, three times a day… or sometimes not. But when the CEO escalates, it’s usually one of 3 things:
Investor question.
Client complaint.
Board urgency.
If the CEO meets an investor and the investor asks a question… The CEO calls the CFO:
Can you sort it out?
CEO meets a client and the client complains… The CFO has to route it:
Get the situation.
Call the right people.
Protect the company.
Decide on the response.
Protect the relationship.
This is why CFOs can’t just stay in spreadsheets.
They’re a response system.
12:00 - 2:00 PM
A cash check (when it actually becomes real)
My cash routine might annoy the real-time dashboard crowd.
Cash checking is often scheduled.
Every morning around 10–11am, once bank statements are booked, you check cash. Then you ask one question:
What does it mean for the forecast?
Not:
What does it mean for my emotions?
Cash is a signal.
The CFO’s job is interpreting it.
Some of the best CFO work doesn’t happen sitting down. So I leave my desk to walk around. And that’s when I hear reality. I’d take the elevator three floors down and talk to people I wasn’t scheduled to meet and ask them:
How are things going?
What’s slowing you down?
What’s not working?
Dashboards tell you what happened. Walking tells you what’s about to break.
Sometimes, the most productive thing a CFO can do isn’t opening a spreadsheet.
It’s leaving the desk.
You must spend time in the business, not just around it.
That means visiting clients (especially the ones who aren’t paying), going on customer trips with sales, and walking branches, factories, hospitals, or shops to see how work actually gets done.
Yes, it costs time.
But it saves something more valuable: false certainty. When CFOs don’t understand how the business really works, they fall back on numbers, and numbers without context slow decisions and turn finance into a bottleneck.
Dashboards tell you what happened.
Being there tells you what’s about to happen.
2:00 - 5:00 PM
The real value of a CFO is time with the team
Strategy is overrated and spending time with people is underrated.
If my team is happy, then everything is taken care of.
So I spent the day being available.
Answering questions.
Unblocking issues.
Coaching.
Listening.
Then I spend my time handling my own work:
Slides.
Prep.
Board story.
A lot of CFO output is produced through the team.
The CFO isn’t a machine.
The CFO is an amplifier.
The team truly needs the CFO when
Tax filing issues
Approving payments
Big decision: “left or right?”
Board slides on growth initiatives
And at the same time you must build a team that can decide without the CFO.
Because if everything requires the CFO… the CFO becomes the bottleneck.
Any day can turn into a big mess:
A conflict.
An escalation.
A fairness issue.
A new board topic.
A surprise meeting.
A control breaking somewhere.
That’s why you spend time with your people.
So you see what’s coming before it hits you in the face.
The Best CFO Advice I wish I Knew Earlier
Create protected blocks:
Monday / Wednesday / Friday — 9 to 10 (or 9 to 11).
No meetings. PA is not allowed to book anything. Why?
Because otherwise, your day gets taken. And then you don’t have time to:
Read.
Think.
Prepare.
Breathe.
Step back.
Do real work.
Build the board story.
If you’re booked from 9 to 12 and 12 to 5 every day… You have no time to think. Yes, AI can help you think faster. But it can’t give you time.
Only boundaries do.
6:00 - 9:00 PM
The day ends the way it started.
At the end of the day, you must do a final pass:
What meetings did I have?
What did I forget?
What are the next few days’ critical moments?
Board meeting coming? slides to review? story to tighten?
Then emails. And sometimes… After dinner… 8 to 9.
I’m finishing slides. Or reading the close report that came late. Because the CFO schedule is never clean.
It’s just managed.
We’re Hosting A Private Insider Session
If you want to see how AI is actually used when decisions matter, you’ll want to be in the room. This is not a demo. You can ask questions and challenge.
You’ll see how a CFO actually uses AI across:
Excel models.
Forecast updates.
Board and CEO prep.
Margin and cost decisions.
He’ll walk through:
What files he uploads.
What questions does he ask AI?
What outputs he trusts (and what he ignores).
Where AI saves time, and where it doesn’t
This is how AI fits into a real CFO workflow.
Who this is for
CFOs, FP&A and finance leaders.
Anyone responsible for decisions, not just analysis.
What to expect
Live walkthrough.
Open Q&A.
Honest discussion of what breaks.
Access
Insider members only.
Small group to keep it practical.
The event is on Thursday Feb 12 11:30 AM ET
The Bottom Line
So a CFO day looks like meetings.
But CFO work is not meetings.
CFO work is what happens inside those meetings:
Coaching.
Alignment.
Accountability.
Truth gathering.
Decision-making.
Conflict resolution.
AI won’t replace that.
But AI can give something CFOs desperately need:
Less friction.
Shorter loops.
Fewer dropped balls.
More thinking time.
Even in a world with great AI… You still have exceptions.
A client pays 95% of an invoice. AI can flag it.
But someone still has to decide:
Escalate.
Write it off.
Call the client.
Fix the root cause.
Ask sales if they agreed to a discount.
AI creates clarity.
CFOs still carry accountability.
And that’s all for today.
See you on Thursday!
Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:
If you’re building an AI-powered CFO tech startup, I’d love to hear more and explore if it’s a fit for our investment portfolio.
I’m Wouter Born. A CFOTech investor, advisor, and founder of finstory.ai
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