Upgrade Your Finance Team
- Jerry
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Why Your Finance Team Is Still Driving a 2009 SUV (And What to Do About It)
By ClearBridgeCFO — Financial Clarity. Strategic Growth.
I’m fortunate enough to drive a 2025 SUV. The model doesn’t matter.
It parks itself.
It pulls out of my driveway without my help.
It syncs flawlessly with Apple CarPlay, gives me real-time diagnostics, and even adjusts automatically based on road and weather conditions.
And then… I still have a 2009 SUV.
No automation.
No intelligence.
No insight.
Just manual everything.
Both vehicles will get me to my destination, but one gives me foresight, safety, speed, and confidence. The other just gives me a steering wheel.
Most finance teams today are driving the 2009 version of their business.
They’re stuck in Excel, massaging spreadsheets, manually exporting data, spending nights and weekends closing the books — all while trying to make strategic decisions based on outdated information.
If your company isn’t using Business Intelligence tools, your finance team is driving the 2009 SUV.
Business Intelligence (BI) tools are the 2025 SUV of modern finance.
Tools like:
LiveFlow
Cube
Datarails
Fathom
Power BI
Clidata
Vena
These are not “nice to have.”
These are game changers.
I recently met with one of the Co-Founders of LiveFlow for a demo — and I was blown away by the powerful features of the too. I am fascinated with the Automated dashboards and the Instant cash visibility. It’s like watching Excel on steroids.
Datarails and Cube are the same — incredibly powerful tools that eliminate manual consolidation and free up hours (if not days) of finance work every month. Datarails is great for financial story telling.
If your finance team is buried in Excel, manually pulling data, consolidating files, and updating charts, then it’s not a finance function… it’s a data-entry department.
With BI tools, finance stops reporting history and starts shaping the future.
Modern finance should do three things:
✅ 1. Be forward-looking
Finance should tell you what’s coming — not what happened 30 days ago.
With BI tools, dashboards update automatically.
KPIs are real-time.
Cash runway is clear.
✅ 2. Be a strategic business partner
When finance isn’t buried in spreadsheets, they can actually guide the business.
They can help leadership make decisions:
Should we accelerate hiring?
What would happen if we changed pricing?
Where should we deploy capital for the highest ROI?
This level of insight does not happen in Excel.
Excel is where data lives.
BI tools are where decisions happen.
✅ 3. Tell the financial story
Strategic finance should reveal the narrative:
Where is revenue really coming from?
Which service lines or segments are driving profitability?
What expenses are out of alignment with performance?
Who are the true internal value creators?
BI tools expose the truth hiding in the numbers.
They reveal insights that drive better decisions, higher margins, and faster growth.
The takeaway
If your business still relies on manual spreadsheets, here’s the truth:
You’re making decisions as if it’s 2009.
And in today’s competitive environment, that’s not just inefficient —
it’s dangerous.
Stop driving blind. Level up your finance function.
Need help getting out of spreadsheet hell?
ClearBridgeCFO helps companies:
automate the monthly close,
implement modern BI tools,
build dashboards and KPIs that drive decision-making.
➡️ Book a Strategy Call
Let’s give your finance function the 2025 upgrade it deserves.
Financial Clarity. Strategic Growth.
Comments