What AI Can and Cannot Do for the Finance Function
AI is not a magic wand and it is not optional. For finance professionals, it is closer to the Iron Man suit: it amplifies what you can do, but only if you know how to fly.
Read article →Written from 15 years of operational finance in global travel retail and healthcare logistics. No theory. No generic advice. What actually works in a real finance function.
AI is not a magic wand and it is not optional. For finance professionals, it is closer to the Iron Man suit: it amplifies what you can do, but only if you know how to fly.
Read article →Swiss employer payroll costs go well beyond gross salary. AHV, BVG, ALV, accident insurance, and family allowances add 20 to 25 percent to your salary bill. Here is how it works.
Read article →A practical guide to building a budget for a Swiss SME: what to include, how to structure it, and the common mistakes that make budgets useless by February.
Read article →IFRS 18 replaces IAS 1 in January 2027. Here is how to rebuild your P&L model in Excel to reflect the new mandatory categories and subtotals before the deadline.
Read article →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.