Is your business flying blind?
By that I don’t mean that you don’t know your revenue, profit or bank balance. Most businesses have accounting systems, management accounts and increasingly sophisticated dashboards.
I mean something much more fundamental.
Can you see where your cash is heading — not just where it is today?
Can you confidently say what your cash position will be at the end of this month? Can you see what is expected to come in from customers, what needs to go out to suppliers, what payments are being planned, what currencies you need, and what happens to your cash position when any of those assumptions change?
And, perhaps most importantly, if the number doesn’t look right, can you immediately understand why — and do something about it?
If answering those questions requires spreadsheets, several systems, emails to the finance team and a meeting to pull everything together, then despite having plenty of financial information, your business may still be flying blind.
That may sound surprising because we have never had more financial information available to us. Cloud accounting has transformed finance; banks are connected directly to accounting systems, invoices are increasingly digitised, dashboards can display almost any KPI we want, and now AI promises to analyse enormous amounts of financial data in seconds.
Yet despite all this technology, I believe many businesses still have a fundamental visibility gap.
Most business owners can tell you roughly how much money is in the bank today. The accounting system can tell them what happened last month. The management accounts can explain historical revenue, costs and profitability.
But knowing what cash will actually be available at month-end — and being able to explain what is driving that number — is something quite different.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me as we have developed PersoFi.
I originally thought much of the opportunity in financial technology was about automation: reducing manual bookkeeping, using AI to process transactions, improving reconciliations and making finance teams more efficient. Those things still matter enormously. But the more we have worked with real businesses and real financial data, the more I have come to believe that the bigger problem is visibility.
A business can have accurate accounting records and still have poor financial visibility.
It can have Xero or QuickBooks fully up to date and still rely on spreadsheets to understand cash. It can have an accurate debtor ledger without knowing which customers are actually likely to pay this month. It can have hundreds of supplier invoices recorded correctly without confidence that supplier statements reconcile to the ledger. It can know what it owes without knowing what should actually be paid this week, next week or next month.
This is why I increasingly believe cash is the best place to start.
Cash forces reality into the conversation. Revenue may have been recognised, but has the customer actually paid? An expense may have been recorded, but when does the supplier need to be paid? A project may look profitable, but have all costs that should be recharged actually been invoiced? A business may appear profitable on paper while facing a significant payment run in ten days’ time.
So perhaps the modern CFO dashboard should start with something much simpler than dozens of KPIs:
Cash today. Cash at month-end. Cash over the next three months.
But seeing those three numbers is only the beginning. The real intelligence comes from understanding why.
What customers are driving the expected receipts? Which debtors are overdue? Which suppliers need paying, and are supplier balances accurate? What payments have already been committed? What currencies are required? Which projects or assets are consuming cash? Are there costs sitting in the accounts that should have been recharged to customers?
Once you start looking at finance this way, the traditional distinction between accounting, reporting, cash management and operations begins to disappear.
You start with the cash position and then drill down into the business behind it.
And once you understand what is driving the cash, the next question is obvious: What requires attention?
Perhaps a major customer has not paid. Perhaps a supplier statement does not agree with the accounting records. Perhaps there are invoices waiting for approval. Perhaps a payment run should be delayed by a week. Perhaps foreign currency needs to be purchased. Perhaps project costs have been incurred but never recharged. Perhaps there is revenue sitting in the financial data that nobody has noticed.
This is where AI becomes genuinely interesting to me.
There is currently enormous discussion about where companies should “use AI”. I am increasingly unconvinced that this is the right question. Businesses do not need AI for the sake of having AI. They need to solve business problems.
A much better starting point is:
Where are we losing visibility, cash, time or control?
Then ask where AI can help.
That might mean analysing thousands of transactions to identify a missed recharge. It might mean comparing supplier statements with the accounting ledger and identifying discrepancies. It might mean highlighting unusual debtor behaviour or identifying which collections deserve immediate attention. It might mean bringing together accounting and operational information so that management can understand why cash is moving.
But insight without action has limited value.
This is another area where I think financial software needs to evolve. We have become very good at creating dashboards that tell management something interesting. But after seeing the dashboard, the CFO often leaves the system and starts doing the actual work elsewhere.
They email the customer. They open a spreadsheet. They reconcile the supplier. They prepare a payment file. They log into the bank. They use Wise to purchase currency. They return to the accounting system to check what happened.
The information and the action are disconnected.
The opportunity, as I see it, is to bring them together.
If the system identifies an overdue customer, finance should be able to follow up and send the statement. If a supplier balance looks wrong, it should be possible to investigate and reconcile it. If cash is tight, payments should be scheduled intelligently. Once payments are approved, the finance team should be able to create payment runs, batch payments and multi-currency payments, and execute them through platforms such as Wise.
And then the cycle starts again, because every action changes the cash position.
That is the model we are increasingly building around at PersoFi:
See → Understand → Find → Act → Execute → See again.
The interesting thing is that this creates value in several different ways.
Better supplier reconciliation and payment control protect cash. Better debtor intelligence and collections accelerate cash. Identifying missed recharges and revenue leakage can actually find cash that the business did not realise it was missing.
And when all of that information is brought together, it starts to become something more than cash management. It becomes CFO and, ultimately, board-level intelligence.
This is why I do not see the future of finance as replacing Xero, QuickBooks or other major accounting platforms. Quite the opposite. The better those platforms become, the stronger the foundation becomes.
The accounting platform remains an important source of financial truth. Operational data adds business context. AI helps analyse and identify what matters. Workflows create control. Payment platforms provide execution. And the CFO, CEO or business owner remains responsible for the decisions.
That last point matters.
I do not believe the objective should be an autonomous AI CFO moving millions of pounds without human judgement. Finance involves accountability, context and judgement. The opportunity is to give the human decision-maker dramatically better information and dramatically better tools with which to act.
Perhaps that is what the AI-powered CFO office will ultimately look like.
Not an AI chatbot replacing the CFO.
Not another dashboard.
Not simply faster bookkeeping.
Rather, a financial operating environment that continuously tells management where the business stands, where it is heading, what is driving the numbers, what requires attention and what can be done about it.
That is the direction we are exploring with PersoFi, and it has changed how I think about the opportunity.
We started by looking at financial automation.
Increasingly, I believe the bigger opportunity is financial visibility connected to action.
And the simplest way to understand whether that problem exists in a business is still the question we started with:
What will your cash position be at the end of this month — and can you explain why?
If answering that question requires several spreadsheets, multiple systems, emails to the finance team and a meeting to interpret the results, perhaps the business is not as financially visible as it believes.
Perhaps, despite all the technology, it is still flying blind.
See it for yourself
In a five-minute PersoFi demo, we will show you how a business can move from flying blind to financial visibility and action.
See your cash today, at month-end and looking forward. Understand the customers, suppliers, payments and currencies driving it. Identify risks and opportunities, from overdue debtors and supplier discrepancies to missed recharges. Then see how PersoFi moves from insight into action through collections, payment scheduling, batch payments and multi-currency execution.
Five minutes. One connected financial view. See what PersoFi can do.
PersoFi — Personalised Financial Intelligence
Know your cash. Understand what is driving it. Take action.
