Company Cfo

/company-cfo — Monthly company CFO workflow

The standing analysis leadership uses to make distribution / cuts / hiring / runway decisions. Primary cadence is monthly (run on the 1st for the closed prior month). Weekly and scenario modes cover the in-between.

Anonymized team-scope sibling to personal-cfo (households). Same discipline (transaction-sum EOM, categorization traps, scenario modeling) applied to company books.

Step 0 — Load company config + prior run

Before starting work, read these in order:

1. The config doc in ${COMPANY_CFO_ROOT:-$HOME/code/company-cfo}/ (CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, whichever exists) — your company's specific methodology, data source map, categorization rules, distribution mechanics. This is the source of truth for HOW your company computes things. Don't invent your own methodology.
2. The most recent report in ${COMPANY_CFO_ROOT}/reports/monthly/ — last month's snapshot. Tells you what leadership decided + what was open.
3. The most recent *-followup.md in that folder (if one exists) — supplementary decisions, scenario analysis.
4. Any relevant memory notes in your agent's memory, or ${MAKERSKILLS_MEMORY:-${MAKERSKILLS_CONFIG:-$HOME/.config/makerskills}/memory}/ if it has none — running context: known anomalies, leadership constraints, current churn state.
5. git log --oneline -10 in ${COMPANY_CFO_ROOT} — what's shipped since the last run.

If the COMPANY_CFO_ROOT dir doesn't exist yet: first-run walkthrough asks the user to mkdir it, seed an AGENTS.md from references/company-config-template.md (symlink CLAUDE.md to it for Claude Code), and set the env var.

Step 1 — Parse mode

Below sections walk through monthly in detail. Weekly + scenario are summarized at the end.

Monthly workflow

Ask the user: Which month are we reporting on? (Default: prior calendar month.)

Then walk through these phases. Pause and confirm before moving to the next.

Phase 1 — Pull raw data

For the target month, pull raw data from each source. Standard source categories (each company's actual tools live in its config doc):

Save all pulls to ${COMPANY_CFO_ROOT}/data/YYYY-MM/<source>-*.json[l] (gitignored — raw data doesn't get committed).

Also pull the current cash balance from the bank source for the "today" starting-cash figure.

If a source isn't wired yet: use /toolify <source> to wire it up before running the CFO workflow. First-time integration is a one-time cost.

Phase 2 — Categorize and reconcile

Bucket all cash-account outflows into the categories your company uses. See references/categorization.md for a starter category set and the discipline of maintaining categorization.

Universal traps to check (see references/traps.md for full list):

• Cash-vs-credit double-count — if the bank shows a "credit card autopay" outflow AND the credit card account shows individual charges, don't count both. Filter to cash accounts only OR treat the CC as a debt account.
• Internal transfers — Checking ↔ Savings transfers net to zero. Exclude them (usually via a kind=internalTransfer filter or account-pair match).
• Currency mismatches — contractor payment tools often return destination_amount in the worker's payout currency. Always use source_amount (or equivalent) for USD/base-currency cost analysis.
• Distribution counting — if leadership has N partners who should get a monthly distribution, verify N distributions exist. If N-1, flag the missing partner — often one is deferring their draw to balance cash.

Cross-checks before writing the report:

• Total payroll debits in bank ≈ payroll-tool API total + fees (within a small residual for held deductions)
• Payment processor payouts arriving in the month ≈ bank inflows from that processor (within timing lag)
• Expense-management outflows in bank ≈ approved expenses in expense-mgmt tool (with cash-basis lag)

Phase 3 — Compute EOM cash (the transaction-sum method)

Use transaction sums, not the walkback-from-current-balance method. Walkback has bitten CFO workflows repeatedly — a bank API balance snapshot at pull time can be off by tens of thousands, and that error propagates into every historical EOM value.

Correct method (see references/eom-cash-methodology.md for the full recipe):

# 1. Pull ALL transactions for each cash account (Checking + Savings + any other cash-holding):
#    <bank-tool> transactions list --account-id <id> --format jsonl --max-items 100000
# 2. Sum the amount field across all transactions in each account.
# 3. The sum should equal that account's CURRENT available_balance exactly.
#    (Sanity check — if not, missing data or a pre-history baseline deposit exists.)
# 4. For any past date T: balance_at_T = sum of all transactions posted on or before T
#    (plus any pre-history baseline, which should be ~$0 if the sanity check passes).

Cross-check EOM: last month's EOM + this month's net cash change should equal this month's EOM, to the dollar.

If transaction sums don't reconcile with current balance, do not proceed with walkback as fallback. Investigate the gap first — missing pulls (timeout, paging), an unknown account, or a legitimate pre-history baseline.

Phase 4 — Update the scenario projector

Most CFO workflows benefit from a scenario projector — an interactive forecast that projects EOM cash forward N months under adjustable assumptions (revenue growth, expense scenarios, hiring plans, distribution changes).

Common structure (see references/scenario-projector.md for the reference implementation):

• HISTORICAL (trailing 3 closed months) — provides context before TODAY
• TODAY — actual current cash balance (calendar-positioned within current month)
• Mo 1 — current calendar month EOM (partial — remaining-month activity)
• Mo 2-7 — next 6 full calendar month EOMs (scenario settings apply from here)

Each month: starting + revenue − expenses = profit → ending

Intramonth cycle low (for weekly cash pulse relevance): most CFO systems care about the low point of the month (when you might hit a cash floor), not just the high (EOM). Formula depends on payout cadence — see references/scenario-projector.md.

Update the projector each monthly run:

1. Append the just-closed month to HISTORICAL with all category fields; drop the oldest.
2. Update startingCash to today's actual bank balance.
3. Update expense baselines for any category that materially shifted.
4. Update baselineMrr (net of processing fees).
5. Verify presets still make sense (scenarios may need updating if comp structure or hiring plans changed).

Phase 5 — Write the snapshot report

Create ${COMPANY_CFO_ROOT}/reports/monthly/YYYY-MM.md following the template in references/report-template.md. Sections (adapt as needed):

1. TL;DR — headline + status table (net cash, ending balance, current MRR, trailing-N-month, recommendation)
2. Cash In — by source (payment processor, alt revenue, one-times)
3. Cash Out — by category (matches the projector's category structure)
4. Payroll breakdown — verified contractor + W-2 split
5. Distributions — who got paid, who didn't (flag anomalies)
6. Revenue metrics — active subs, MRR delta, recent cancels with $ and customer
7. Forward projection — 1-3 scenarios from the projector (link the projector state)
8. Recommended actions — concrete for leadership to decide on
9. Open items — questions to resolve next month

Write the why-paragraph in plain English: what happened and why. Reference the previous month if there's continuity ("Vendor X churn from last month finished hitting June payouts").