It might be the most useful question a CFO can ask.
Last week, CFO Techstack brought together the first UK meeting of FLAC, the Finance Leaders Advisory Council. FLAC brings together senior finance leaders scaling on Xero. It’s where they can share insights and experiences to show other finance teams what’s possible with a modern tech stack.
For its first UK meeting, we invited Aaron Markowitz-Shulman, CFO at PawaPay, to join us as a guest speaker.
At PawaPay, Aaron oversees finance, treasury, tax and legal across 20 African countries. He’s navigating the kind of growth and complexity that puts a finance function to the test. He sat down with David Tuck to talk about what he’s learned and opened the conversation to the finance leaders in the room.
Aaron talked AI. Fundraising. Leadership. Scaling finance teams. The future of the CFO role. But one question has been rattling around our heads ever since.
"How should I feel about it?"
Aaron’s view is that finance has traditionally been very good at answering two questions:
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What happened?
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Why did it happen?
Both matter. But he thinks finance needs to go further.
What's going to happen next?
And then his favourite question: How should I feel about it?
Take revenue falling by 20%.
That sounds terrible.
But what if your biggest customer has gone bankrupt, while every other customer has grown strongly enough to offset most of that decline?
The number hasn't changed. Revenue is still down 20%. But how you feel about it probably has. And, more importantly, the conversation you have next should be completely different.
That's the point.
Numbers on their own don't make decisions. Context does. Finance shouldn't simply tell the business that revenue is down, gross margin has moved or costs are above budget. The value comes from explaining what that change means, what sits behind it and where the conversation needs to go next.
Of course, getting there requires finance teams to have confidence in the numbers in the first place.
Aaron was equally clear on that point. If a founder asks how much cash the business had last July, what it spent on marketing a year ago or why gross margin has moved, finance needs to be able to answer.
If the response is "give me a couple of days while I work it out", you're already behind.
It's one of the reasons PawaPay has spent so much time improving its finance operations. When Aaron joined, month end took around 32 days and relied on one enormous spreadsheet he nicknamed the "Spreadsheet of Death".
Today, the close is down to around nine working days.
The real gain wasn't simply speed. It was giving the finance team enough confidence in its information to start asking better questions.
We spend a lot of time talking about finance becoming "more strategic". It's a phrase that has been repeated so often it risks meaning almost nothing.
But perhaps this is what strategic finance looks like in practice: getting the fundamentals right, helping the business understand the significance of the numbers and starting better conversations about what happens next.
So here's a question to steal for your next finance meeting. The next time someone tells you what happened, ask them one more thing: How should I feel about it?
We'd love to know what happens next.
We're continuing the conversation in the CFO Techstack Slack. Do you already have a question you use to get your team beyond the numbers and into what they actually mean?
Come and share it with the community.
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