Inside the CFO Office: Microscope, Telescope…and a Fire Extinguisher

What happens when your company goes public - but your processes don’t show up?

In this episode of Trust the Process, we follow Emma, a young analyst in the CFO office, as she uncovers a costly pattern hidden deep in the data.

Featuring finance transformation experts Martin Wolleswinkel (EY) and Gori von Hirschhausen (PwC), we explore how Process Intelligence gives CFOs the clarity they need.

Because in a world of real-time reporting, rising investor scrutiny, and endless data chaos - the CFO Office needs process clarity.

The following is a transcript of the podcast, edited and organized for readability.

Emma’s Missed Dinner Party

Poor Emma… It’s half past 10, and my friend Emma’s still at her desk. All of us are out for dinner tonight but for Emma it’s the fourth night in a row. The office is dark except for the dull glow of her screen. Somewhere down the hall, a printer hums to life—probably another last-minute board request.

Two months ago, her company went public. The IPO was a rush of confetti and champagne. Now? It’s reporting season. And Emma—26, her first role in the CFO office—is drowning in an Excel spreadsheet.

Invoices aren’t adding up. There's a huge discrepancy in payments. No one knows how POs and invoices match. Procurement insists it's Accounting. Accounting blames Procurement. And the CFO? She wants answers. Fast.

“We can’t afford surprises,” she told her. “Not with Wall Street watching.”

Emma scrolls through endless line items, searching for patterns in the chaos of cells. But deep down she knows: this isn’t about broken spreadsheets. It’s about broken processes.

In this episode we’re inside the CFO Office - and we are the microscope, telescope and fire extinguisher all at once.

We’re lifting the lid on the pressure cooker that is modern finance departments. What happens when your company goes public, scrutiny skyrockets, and the CFO office is suddenly expected to be both a fortress of control and a hub for strategic innovation?

To help us make sense of this, we’ve brought in two of the best minds in finance transformation:

• Martin Wolleswinkel, a seasoned CFO advisor from EY who’s spent nearly three decades helping finance teams shift from transactional chaos to value-creation.
• Gori von Hirschhausen, Head of Transformation Consulting at PwC.

If you’ve ever wondered how the CFO office can survive—and thrive— in all this … you’re in the right place.

Chapter 1: What the CFO Office Really Does

Emma is an FP&A analyst. That stands for financial planning and analysis. Her job is to help the company plan, forecast, and make sure financial performance stays on track.

But in a post-IPO world, that means more than just spreadsheets.

A CFO nowadays is more of a value architect for the organisation. Martin shares the outbound view the CFO office needs to take on:

Martin Wolleswinkel: We see two kind of things that are challenging for CFOs that come from different angles. One is that today we all know economic turmoil, geographical instabilities, there is a lot of pressure on performance of the companies, and first and foremost, the CFO is the economic advisor and guardian of economic results and financial results. Hence, getting that performance to an acceptable level, especially if companies are stock listed, is a specific challenge to keep the business going, looking at costs, et cetera.

Quite similarly, the CFO office also needs to look inside the business:

Martin Wolleswinkel: The other challenge is a more strategic one. If we look at companies today, especially since the rise of AI... However, it's a common theme that business reinvention is crucial. And we also see that the CFO needs to play a key role because business reinvention means heavy transformation, heavy investments, heavy rethinking of business models, which needs to have an economic evaluation in the end and as the CFO's job... Fast. And it also means that as a CFO, I need to try to keep that balance of keeping the team going and focusing on today's results while taking also the organization towards the journey towards the future.

That role covers everything from financial reporting and risk control to building strategy. It’s shaping the business — not just tracking it.

Emma’s team builds models, flags risks, answers board questions—and keeps the business running in times of hype and crisis.

And as Gori, Head of Transformation consulting at PwC, puts it, that job is now a balancing act between microscope and telescope:

Gori von Hirschhausen: I like the term of he needs to have a microscope and a telescope at the same time. So this means with the microscope basically, that we need to really understand in detail how our performance is. Do we really deliver to the promises we make in the budget? Do we really know our customers in detail? Do we know, for example, how the competition is doing? All of this needs to have this microscope view, which basically is completeness of information, correctness of information, up-to-dateness of the information and the tangible aspect of this information for taking the right business decisions. So that's the microscope. But at the same time, I need the telescope. I need to better understand not just the past, but more the future. I need to anticipate what the future will bring. So this means I need to be more driver-based. I need to have applied statistic methods. I need preciseness about what will come. I need this predictive view. And this all needs to be at my hand in nearly real time.

That’s what Emma's team is meant to do—navigate the business with precision, zooming in on the numbers and projecting into the future. But right now, the objective lens in her microscope is cracked.

The data she collects in her spreadsheets is patchy and often disconnected. Different departments rely on a mix of systems—ERP platforms, BI dashboards, spreadsheets, and homegrown trackers. Each one offers a slice of the truth, but rarely the whole pie.

Chapter 2: The Pressure Cooker

After going public, Emma's company now reports quarterly. That means constant pressure to deliver. Any delay in cash flow, any margin slip, any mismatch in data? It’s visible. To investors. To analysts. To everyone.

But the processes behind those numbers—especially those that don’t work—are often invisible.

Martin Wolleswinkel: So when I started in 1996, in consulting, we also had the same pyramids that we show today. We spent too much time in transactional finance, too little focus on value driving finance, and that pyramid needs to flip. And that was the story 28 years ago, and that story hasn't changed.

Emma is feeling the pressure. On the one hand, she's trying to plug financial gaps. On the other, the CFO is asking for a forward-looking investment strategy for new technologies and AI transformation.

Martin Wolleswinkel: So as the CFO, I need to guide my organization, which technologies to invest in, which ones to focus, which ones maybe to drop or to wait until others are coming.

Meanwhile, departments stopped talking—and processes don’t talk either.

Emma and her team know something has to change. She needs to look both inside the organization and outside to keep the company alive through an IPO during all macroeconomics and tech evolutions that hit it.

How she would do that became more than a strategic challenge. For Emma, it turned into a personal mission.

Because while everyone else argued over who owned the problem, she opened a new tab, pulled another report, and dug a little deeper...

And you won’t believe what she found next.

Chapter 3: How Process Intelligence Changes the Game

Emma’s job in the CFO office wasn’t meant to be investigative. As an FP&A analyst, her role was to analyze trends, support forecasting, and help explain the “why” behind the numbers. But when the numbers didn’t add up—when actual spend started creeping above budget in strange ways—Emma did what many analysts do: she started digging.

It wasn’t long before she spotted a pattern. A vendor invoice had been paid twice. Then another. They weren’t identical—different approval timestamps, slightly different vendor IDs—but the amounts were the same. The descriptions too.

At first, the team chalked it up to human error. A fluke. But Emma wasn’t so sure. She began pulling more invoices. And while she couldn’t prove it was systemic, she could prove it was expensive. Over $200,000 lost in one quarter to duplicate payments.

Emma raised the issue, and the team decided to test a new approach: Process Intelligence.

Gori von Hirschhausen: Looking at the reality of companies these days, we have some that are very much data-driven, but we still have a lot of companies where you do need to understand the danger of half-truths that constitutes so much conventional wisdom in these companies. What do I mean by this? Looking at process intelligence. When we do as a consultant company, when we have an engagement and we are asked how to optimize a certain function, we of course take a look at the processes. And what we then learn is when we speak to the people about these processes, they have a certain understanding of the process. But if you look into the facts, if you look into the data, you will see that there's a difference. And it's so important to really understand what the truth is, to really understand what the process standards are that you design, but then what the reality of the process flow looks like.

PI helped Emma aggregate and compare information from across IT systems and departments. Data was scattered across SAP, Workday, and Oracle.

But the team could start to see patterns that previously took weeks to unearth. Duplicate payments were suddenly traceable. And root causes began to emerge—Emma found out that there were misaligned vendor records and inconsistent naming conventions. Those were things that Emma suspected, but they now surfaced in black and white.

Process Intelligence didn’t automatically solve the problem. It surfaced it. It showed where the fires were—but the team still had to put them out. Emma’s team had to redesign controls, and clean vendor master data.

Gori von Hirschhausen: This shift goes from more data transactional work to more thinking, advising, consulting work.

Emma did what she’d done from the beginning—she kept digging. She paired process intelligence with context. She traced exceptions and shared evidence, and she drove awareness with the business on the real impact of duplicate payments.

Martin Wolleswinkel: When it comes to driving down cost out of the organization, especially for a CFO in the, let's call it transactional site, it could be transactional finance processes, procurement processes, that are also often part of the CFO's remit, and for that, without process intelligence, they will have, like we discussed before, either to put a ton of effort and people on it, which they don't have anymore. So that's why it's so adamant that process intelligence provide platform to drive out costs for them.

Emma hasn’t stopped questioning things.

Process Intelligence is a tool for Emma to investigate on the business—it’s a better lens for our microscope and the telescope.

Suddenly, the CFO isn’t just reacting to what happened last quarter. Leakages like our duplicate payments can be stopped before the damage is done.

PI hasn’t solved everything. But it’s changed how the CFO works —and more importantly, how they see.

Wrap-Up & Call to Action

So let’s zoom out. Emma’s story might’ve started with spreadsheets, stress and a missed dinner invitation—but what it really shows us is this: the world she’s operating in has changed. Completely. What do you think, Gori?

Gori von Hirschhausen: “VUCA means volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity... but this now meets the so-called BANI world, which adds brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible. And this is new to CFOs… because now this all falls into one.”

VUCA, BANI. Whatever. What’s needed is clarity.

That’s what Process Intelligence brings—both for the microscope and telescope. And sometimes it even is the fire extinguisher.

Join us next time as we shift from the CFO’s desk to the consultant’s playbook. Process Intelligence is not only reshaping Emma’s day to day but also the way consultants work.

Because when processes work, everything works (and Emma can finally join us for dinner)