Written from 15 years of operational finance at Dufry Group and Bomi (UPS Group). No theory. No generic advice. What actually works in a real finance function.
IFRS 18 replaces IAS 1 from January 2027. New income statement categories, mandatory subtotals, and management-defined performance measure disclosures. Here is what changes and what controllers need to do in 2026.
Read article →A rolling budget replaces the frozen annual plan with a continuously updated 12-month horizon. Here is how it works, when to use it, and how to build one that actually improves decisions.
Read article →Most finance teams treat the month-end close like a fire drill. Every month, the same chaos: someone is waiting on invoices, another person is chasing...
Read article →Project-based businesses, seasonal companies, and early-stage growth firms all share the same forecasting problem: the annual budget was built on...
Read article →Every few years, the question of which ERP to use comes up in a growing Swiss company. Sometimes it is triggered by the business outgrowing its current...
Read article →There is a question I ask every time I start working with a new finance team: "When do your books actually close?"
Read article →Zero-based budgeting has a reputation that alternates between management consulting gold and operational nightmare, depending on who you ask and what...
Read article →There is a category of financial reporting problem that gets blamed on the ERP. The reports are wrong, or incomplete, or require hours of manual work...
Read article →Here is a question worth sitting with: if your management report disappeared tomorrow, would your leadership team make worse decisions?
Read article →There is a conversation that happens in CFO offices and boardrooms more often than most people realise. A company has just had its best trading year on...
Read article →SAP is the most powerful financial reporting system most controllers will ever work with. It is also one of the most underused. The average SAP...
Read article →Every month, finance teams across Switzerland produce variance reports that say some version of the same thing: revenue was below budget, costs were...
Read article →The 13-week cash flow forecast is one of those tools that most finance professionals have heard of but far fewer have actually built and maintained. It...
Read article →Most cash flow conversations in growing companies default to the same conclusion: we need more revenue. More sales will fix the cash position. The top...
Read article →There is a predictable moment in the growth of every finance function when the Excel-based management reporting starts to feel like it is about to...
Read article →Most Swiss SME owners have a Treuhänder. They get annual accounts, tax declarations, payroll administration, and a phone call when something regulatory...
Read article →The conversation with the bank about a credit line is one that many business owners approach with unnecessary anxiety and insufficient preparation. Too...
Read article →ERP implementations are almost universally approached as accounting projects. The project team designs the chart of accounts to satisfy the statutory...
Read article →Financial reporting problems rarely announce themselves. They do not trigger an alert, generate an error message, or show up as a line item on the P&L....
Read article →Most growing companies discover their working capital problem the same way. The business is expanding, revenue is up, the team is energised, and then...
Read article →If you have ever sat in a meeting where someone used these three terms interchangeably, you were not imagining the confusion. Business plan, budget,...
Read article →Cost centre reporting is one of those topics that sounds technical but is fundamentally a business design question. Before you configure anything in...
Read article →Most business owners can tell you their total revenue to the nearest CHF 10K. Very few can tell you which client, product line, or business unit is...
Read article →Most business plans are not read. They are scanned.
Read article →Here is a question that reveals a lot about the reliability of a company's financial reporting: if you closed your books today without posting a single...
Read article →Most cost reduction conversations in growing companies go to the same place immediately: headcount. If margins are under pressure or cash is tight, the...
Read article →Most board packs are too long, arrive too late, and are structured for the person who wrote them rather than the people who need to read them....
Read article →Most growing companies put off building a proper annual budget for the same reason they put off going to the dentist. They know they should, they...
Read article →The P&L tells you whether the business made money. The contribution margin analysis tells you which parts of the business made money and which parts...
Read article →Financial due diligence is the process through which a potential acquirer, investor, or merger partner examines the financial records and reporting of...
Read article →Every year, finance teams across Switzerland spend weeks building an annual budget. They gather inputs from department heads, model revenue scenarios,...
Read article →Every business owner has asked the question. Usually at eleven o'clock at night, looking at a spreadsheet, trying to figure out what happens to the...
Read article →The distinction between fixed and variable costs is taught in every introductory finance course. Most business owners and managers believe they...
Read article →A board of directors for a mid-size company typically includes three to five people with very different relationships to financial information. One or...
Read article →Let's start with an uncomfortable truth: the budget you approved in November is already wrong.
Read article →The make-or-buy question comes up in most businesses more often than it is formally analysed. Should we build this component ourselves or source it...
Read article →Most business owners approach the annual accounts as a compliance exercise: something that needs to be filed, signed off, and sent to the bank because...
Read article →Cost reduction is one of the most sensitive exercises a finance team can lead. Done well, it improves the financial position of the business without...
Read article →The statutory audit has a reputation for disruption that is largely self-inflicted. Finance teams that treat the audit as an annual surprise,...
Read article →One of the most common and most expensive misunderstandings in Swiss SME finance is the assumption that these three roles are interchangeable, or that...
Read article →Swiss VAT (Mehrwertsteuer, MWST) is not the most complex VAT system in Europe, but it has enough specific features, filing requirements, and common...
Read article →The Swiss Kontenrahmen KMU (the standard chart of accounts for small and medium enterprises) is the accounting framework that most Swiss companies use...
Read article →Swiss company law imposes financial reporting obligations on every legal entity. The scope of those obligations depends on the size of the company, its...
Read article →The moment a Swiss company establishes a foreign subsidiary, the finance function gains a new category of complexity that the accounting system, the...
Read article →Switzerland's position at the centre of European trade, combined with the CHF's status as a safe-haven currency that regularly appreciates against the...
Read article →Most Swiss SMEs add a controller too late. The signals that the business needs dedicated management accounting capability have usually been present for...
Read article →Finance function transitions are among the highest-risk events in a company's operational life. When a controller or CFO leaves — or when a company...
Read article →The controller resigned on Friday. Or they were let go. Or they are on sick leave with no clear return date. Regardless of how it happened, the finance...
Read article →The decision between hiring a full-time controller and engaging a part-time or fractional resource is, at its core, a straightforward cost-benefit...
Read article →Excel proficiency separates controllers who spend their time on analysis from controllers who spend it on data preparation. The difference is not about...
Read article →A management reporting template that scales is one that can be updated in two hours at month-end, not rebuilt from scratch in two days. It is one where...
Read article →Double-entry bookkeeping is the foundation of all financial accounting. Every transaction in every accounting system in the world, from Bexio to SAP,...
Read article →There is a meaningful difference between an Excel file that contains financial calculations and a financial model. The file contains numbers and...
Read article →If you search for "cash flow forecast template Excel" or "management report template Switzerland," you will find dozens of free downloads within a few...
Read article →If your finance function needs hands-on help, not just reading material, let's talk. I work with companies in Zurich and Switzerland as a part-time controller and CFO.