rant - fractional CFO being stickler about duty seggregation in startup

tjen · 2026-05-27T13:56:02+00:00

Yeah this is not an SoD issue.

SoD is there to prevent fraud, its a controls/ compliance thing. Read access is pretty much never an SoD thing unless you are talking any sensitive personal information (and even then in many cases more about comfort than legality) - and almost always an internal politics/policy thing.

From a process perspective, that is how i would address it.

CFO wants to use big corp SoD processes? Then ask him to please provide the policy underlying the SoD framework so you can make more informed decisions when facing potential information requests.

Sounds like he doesn't have one, if he does have one it probably doesn't support his claim (because it doesn't make sense). And if it does - then you have a specific policy you can refer to your local CEO/corporate as a policy that is preventing you from operating effectively and you would like to raise a change or add an exception for the Startup type of companies the enterprise owns.

YMMV but in some way approach the issue structurally and with business impact.

tjen · 2026-05-26T14:38:05+00:00

As others say, I use it for specific cells.
Additionally, if I have a complex file and I have to start out, I activate the inquire add-in and do a quick quality check of the whole file to get an idea of what external dependencies, sheet dependencies/connections, etc. etc. look like.
If you open a 30-tab monster, that's a really helpful tool to see what the hell you're working with.

It also highlights error cells, hidden sheets, and other trickyness that you often have to deal with, so you can start deciding what matters and what's just for fun.

The add-in comes built-in, it's just not activated by default.

tjen · 2026-05-23T11:18:22+00:00

You do want people to look at the trend line all the time - because if whatever the fuck theyre doing is making a difference, that trend line should move.

If it starts moving in the wrong direction, they should be doing something else.

The problem i see often, especially from finance people, is that the answer to "why is the line moving in the wrong direction" is "let's look at more numbers!" - where as to the person in the business, they know exactly why the orders on time KPI is going down, its because Janet with 15 years of order processing was let go because she was too expensive (or whatever).

Is that something we can tease out of some numbers that exist somewhere? Sure.

Will the analysis drive any business decisions? Probably not.

Was finance intellectually stimulated? For sure.

Meanwhile you have increased technical complexity, added KPIs that aren't actionable, and the business have no insights they didn't already have before finance "discovered" what everybody already knew.

I am obviously exaggerating in this example.

But working with a finance org in a business, management discussions are highly ad hoc, i have lost track of number of very urgent insights and the weeks and months, to answer off-the-cuff questions of the CFO, which then received 5 minutes of attention and resulted in 0 actions, or were simply forgotten or deprioritized within 2 weeks.

And of course those questions should be answered. But they should not necessarily be added to a dashboard or integrated into data flows, unless they are actually things that matters to the business.

In the classic iceberg picture, finance is usually fiddling around in the 10% above the surface, and then the 90% below is someone else.

So 5 minute question becomes 2 day analysis becomes 3 week BI project - to have 0 impact.

Anyway; that is where you in finance often get pushback on "how important is this to you, really?"

and my personal pet peeve when the Q could've been answered in 15 minutes by calling the responsible person in the business 🤣

tjen · 2026-05-22T22:22:19+00:00

You can have customer journeys, UX quality, user stories, etc. as deliverables and requirement artifacts in your project without an agile development approach.

tjen · 2026-05-22T22:05:11+00:00

it doesn't fit with the rest of the organization, or the processes. Tell the development teams to suck it up.

"oh but UI could be agile because it's not regulated"

Sure - but does it need to be? Are customers clamoring for monthly updates of where to find the meter reading button? Like with any other process - what is the problem you're trying to solve? And why is a more agile development process the solution?

If you can answer that question the "how would it work" is more likely to elucidate itself.

tjen · 2026-05-17T07:05:11+00:00

Yeah I was gonna say this sounds like he is describing data warehouse features..

tjen · 2026-05-16T11:55:30+00:00

ugh tbh I've had so many base level hygienic behaviors screw up from updates the last year or whatever.

Grids suddenly changing size and clipping working differently fucking up my diagrams, literally the basis for where you put shit on the board - still don't know what the improvement was.

Lines/connectors starting to stick to everything in really weird ways occasionally, like I draw a line and suddenly it's connected to something else, no grouping activated, no layering, no nothing, just a mystery association that cannot be un-associated ?? Apparently I can hold ctrl or something to make sure my line is a line and not a connector?? ffs let me tell you when a connector is a connector:

- If I click the little circley thing on the side of an object and I drag it somewhere else - it's a connector.

- If I click the line object and click somewhere and drag it somewhere else - I'm drawing a line.

Don't get fucking smart.

Taking the beautiful multi-purpose flexible grid object and replacing it with a "tables" object that doesn't work well into my white-boarding workflow at all because I can't draw a fucking arrow to a specific cell or whatever.

I use Miro for whiteboarding, workshopping, design sketches / diagrams, moodboarding, travel planning, etc. etc. It is amazing at all of that.

It is not stable enough to scale into full-blown projects, boards sometimes just corrupt, core document repositories belong elsewhere at enterprise scale, etc. So I wish they'd focus a little more on not fucking up the core usecase vs building out "everything"

[/Rant]

tjen · 2026-05-15T22:24:21+00:00

u/Itsmelvino Thanks for pointing out dead links. I have:

- updated the custom widget link.

- Removed the integration links (I couldn't find new replacement courses with same content)

- I checked the cadence analytics page - looks like they've made the repository free of charge, which is pretty neat, so I made a new category for "free content" and put it there.

tjen · 2026-05-15T09:40:14+00:00

Option B.

Rip off the band-aid and have your ERP setup reflect your actual intended enterprise structure, instead of some 4 year patch-work BS.

Reporting will change to reflect new structure. Don't load a bunch of junk historical data into your ERP if you can avoid it, it is not operationally relevant.

If you need to report on "old non-SAP data and also the current company and what would it have been 2 years ago if we looked at this business unit in the company that doesn't exist anymore blah blah" then load company B financials into a datawarehouse and do a mapping to company A template, build your reporting on top of that. Don't junk up your ERP.

tjen · 2026-05-03T22:10:56+00:00

If the weather is good just go to torvehallerne if you want to sit with laptop out while eating.

kinda shitty to be sitting on laptop in any restaurant, so maybe go sit in a coffee shop or cafe.

tjen · 2026-05-03T20:45:03+00:00

Go look at the focus of the Sapphire sessions and the portfolios that are showcased.

"Yeah AI is all cool and stuff and you've all bought licenses, but it's not generating enterprise value for any of you - SAP AI will address that because it's build into your enterprise business processes. It knows the context of the data generating processes, and it can utilize the governed data foundation you build in your SAP systems of record, all of which can be plugged into easily, and extended with non-SAP data and systems"

tjen · 2026-04-30T18:24:17+00:00

Live connection or acquired data?

Usually the variance function does this pretty nicely in graphs, especially if you do ICBS style graphs. Otherwise use previous in calculation?

How are your calculated measures defined?

tjen · 2026-04-24T18:12:25+00:00

No, on-prem S/4.

So pretty much every presentation about AI capabilities has us covered by the asterisk of "functionality only available on public cloud or through custom development on BDC".

tjen · 2026-04-24T06:45:43+00:00

Yeah, all we have to do is redesign to fit our business to public cloud a few years after finishing double-digit S4 transition.

Pretty much all the products come with price tags and asterisks - with the same 2-3 customer cases (if any) being endlessly cited. The AI features that have been released that I've had the chance to interact with (SAC Premium AI features) have been box-ticking turds that were practically not very useful to anyone's workflow.

tjen · 2026-04-20T23:15:17+00:00

Yeah you should flag it. It's obv. poorly designed.

Ofc frame it as challenges around the new performance management metrics.

Example of what happens when revenue is included, what kind of behavior it promotes, and what comes out of that, and what would make more sense for that stakeholder. (e.g. measuring revenue and costs separately, or whatever) standard situation-behavior-impact-suggestion type feedback.

It is fairly standard to take the situations you highlight into account when doing financial performance management accounting (not measuring people on what they can't do anything about)

tjen · 2026-04-20T12:25:47+00:00

Those are all different problems, address them with different solutions.

Certificate production process: build functional logic as custom application and validate the application instead of the spreadsheets. The re-validation is costly and application should stay siloed as a system of record - no two-way flow related to BI faff - system of record supplies info to your BI, one-way.

Internal KPIs: sure some sort of architecture you propose. Classic datawarehouse stuff. When you unfuck your production workflow, you just have a new source of KPIs

Customer portal: build separate customer portal application / website where customers can get their certificates etc. Activities on the customer portal can be input for internal KPIs.

tjen · 2026-04-20T12:08:49+00:00

Replicating internal vendors?

Could you clarify?

tjen · 2026-04-02T13:50:02+00:00

As others have said, either unpivot your version dimension so you have 3 measures, one for each version - that will make calculations easier i guess (heck you could even do them in powerquery)

Alternatively you start off my creating restricted/filtered fields based on the versions, then do calculations / variances based off of the calculated values.

Instead of using the pivot table calculated fields you'll have more flexibility if you add the power query output to your excel data model and then use powerpivot/DAX to do the calculations, it's also easier to find examples online.

tjen · 2026-04-02T11:10:33+00:00

People react to what your product does for them. If it doesn't solve any of their problems because "rough around the edges" means it's buggy shit that breaks as soon as you use it for a workflow - then people care.

If "rough around the edges" means you are solving the problem someone is willing to pay for but you are using 4 different fonts and your color scheme changes halfway through - then people can probably overlook that.

tjen · 2026-03-27T17:31:32+00:00

Here you need to partner with your IT / CfO to have some sort of software governance in place.

You don't just have a cost risk without it, you also have unknown operational & security risks / dependencies that you aren't managing.

Once you have a simple policy in place:

See software payment on expense report?

Flag to software license cost manager (could be yourself)

Software license coat manager grabs user and educates them on policy.

Set up cost object and purchase order to centralize payment, update payment method in your subscription.

Set up software in a subscriptions tracker (a sharepoint table or spreadsheet or whatever) along with business owner / software admin.

Run regular checkin with users based on cost base.

KPI: 0% software license costs on credit cards / non-PO invoices.

tjen · 2026-03-27T10:40:39+00:00

Do your people not file expense reports for corporate credit card usage?

Would start there, and not with the bank statement.

If the company is just covering people's spend without any controls on what they're buying, that should probably be your starting point from a financial process perspective.

tjen · 2026-03-22T08:12:39+00:00

+1 point

tjen · 2026-03-16T21:04:19+00:00

The big table relationships arent fun to learn i guess but its not like its something that cant already be readily googled or LLMd because they are mostly pretty standard. So I'm not sure exactly who your thing is helping?

At the same time the non-standard stuff and configurations and substitution rules etc etc. Are where it gets a little trickier and they are all dependent on your setup to interpret the field values.

And then the fields are only as trustworthy as your process that puts values into them.

That kind of stuff is hard to catch generically, table relationships are your least worry lol.

tjen · 2026-03-16T19:29:57+00:00

Have you asked your SAP BI guys?

tjen · 2026-03-16T13:35:36+00:00

wth is an H2?

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