Your CEO just asked for a rolling 13-week cash forecast by tomorrow. Your FP&A team is still reconciling spreadsheets from three business units. Your board wants predictive margin analysis, but your monthly close takes 12 days.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone, but you should be concerned. Middle-market companies with digitally-enabled finance functions consistently command premium valuations at exit. The gap between where you are and where you need to be is more than operational inefficiency, it’s millions in unrealized enterprise value. Most middle market CFOs tell us the same thing: “We know we need to modernize, but we don’t know where to start.”
The good news? You don’t need to hire a data science team or rip out your ERP. You need a clear 90-day plan and the right capabilities in the right places.
What Winning CFOs Are Actually Doing
Picture this: your finance team closes the books in 5 days instead of 12. You walk into board meetings with three growth scenarios complete with cash implications and margin sensitivities, already modeled and stress-tested. When your CEO asks about the impact of accelerating a product launch, you have the answer in hours, not weeks. Your FP&A analysts spend their time analyzing business drivers instead of chasing down data discrepancies.
That’s what a technology-enabled finance function looks like. You’re not becoming a super-user of the next flashy tool—you’re embedding the right capabilities so you can be a strategic co-pilot to your CEO instead of a scorekeeper.
The Three Capabilities You Actually Need
1. Clean Data Infrastructure
Your finance function needs ownership of data quality and system integration. This means ensuring your CRM revenue matches your financial close, your GL coding is consistent, and your reporting doesn’t break every month-end. Without this foundation, everything else fails.
2. Automated Insights, Not Just Reports
The FP&A function should spend 70% of its time analyzing and 30% gathering data—not the other way around. Automation tools for variance analysis, cash forecasting, and scenario planning enable you to model three growth scenarios in hours instead of weeks.
3. Governance That Scales
As you add automation, your finance function must own the controls. What assumptions drive your models? Who approves forecasting changes? How do you maintain audit trails? In our work with PE-backed companies, analytics initiatives derail when governance isn’t built in from day one.
Notice what’s missing? You don’t need to build a massive team or create new departments. You need the right capabilities embedded in your finance function.
The Decisions That Actually Matter
Build vs. Buy? Unless you’re managing $1B+ in revenue, you can’t afford to build. Start with a managed platform partner built for finance teams. Get wins on the board, then assess whether you need custom development.
Hire vs. Reskill? Both, strategically. Hire one exceptional data-savvy finance professional to set standards and train your team. Then upskill your existing analysts on automation tools. You get fresh expertise without losing institutional knowledge.
Centralize vs. Embed? Hybrid works best for middle-market companies: centralize data infrastructure and governance; embed analytics capability in high-impact business units.
Your 90-Day Playbook
Weeks 1-4: Audit Reality
Identify where time is being wasted. Map where data breaks down between systems. Determine which reports leadership actually uses versus which get produced out of habit.
The insight often reveals itself quickly: finance teams spending 40+ hours monthly on manual consolidation, analysts recreating the same variance reports in three different formats, or forecasting processes that take two weeks when they should take two days.
Weeks 5-8: Build Your Analytics Foundation
Establish ownership for transformation. Define data governance standards, evaluate platform options, and design capability-building for your function.
The platform decision matters: FP&A-specific tools with strong implementation support deliver faster results than general BI platforms that require extensive customization and ongoing technical support.
Weeks 9-12: Launch Your First Use Case
Target a project that is high-visibility but achievable: automated cash forecasting, variance analysis with predictive alerts, or margin analysis by product line. Document assumptions, build in controls, and present results to leadership.
Finance functions that deliver one clean win in 90 days gain immediate momentum for broader transformation. Those that try to rebuild everything at once have nothing tangible to show at the next board meeting.
The Real Talk
“My team is stretched thin.” That’s exactly why you need this. Manual processes are what’s stretching them thin. The upfront investment pays back in weeks.
“Our systems are a mess.” Pick one area—cash, revenue, or margins—and make that data reliable first. Build from there.
“I don’t have budget.” You can launch an analytics hub for less than one senior hire. Cloud FP&A platforms run $30-50K annually. One data analyst is $80-100K. Compare that to the valuation impact of demonstrating predictive finance capabilities.
“Investors expects results now.” Perfect. Every quarter you wait is another quarter your investors benchmark you against other portfolio companies—and wonders why you’re behind.
What You’re Building Toward
The best finance teams present forward-looking scenarios, not just variance reports. They answer “what if we accelerate hiring in Q2?” in hours, not days. They close books in 5 days because the process is automated and controlled.
Most importantly, they’ve become talent magnets. Top finance professionals want environments where they’re learning modern tools and driving strategy and not just processing journal entries.
Where to start
The hardest part of any transformation is knowing where you stand today. Most middle-market CFOs we work with already sense where the gaps are, they just need confirmation and a practical path forward.
E78 partners with middle-market and PE-backed companies to modernize finance operations while maintaining visibility and control. We help finance leaders bridge the gap between strategic vision and execution by integrating finance strategy, data enablement, and vendor governance into a cohesive plan.
If you’re evaluating your next steps, we offer a Finance-Tech Maturity Assessment designed to give you clarity, fast:
- An honest view of where your finance function stands today
- The capability gaps most likely limiting your strategic impact
- A practical 90-day roadmap you can action immediately
Sometimes the best next step is a clear picture of what needs to happen.
Ready to assess where you stand? Contact E78 to get started. Your board expects finance to drive growth, not just track it. That starts with knowing exactly what to build first.