What to look at first, what to leave alone, and how to tell the difference — from someone who has been inside a lot of these finance functions.
You are somewhere in the first sixty days. You were hired because the company is about to become something it currently is not — commercial, public, acquisitive, international, or all four — and everyone is being helpful and nobody is being precise.
You have inherited a finance function built by good people under pressure, which means it works and it is not documented. You are being asked for a view on systems in a meeting next month, and you do not yet know enough to have one you would defend.
The system decision gets made before the process is understood. A new CFO arrives, finds the ERP inadequate, and starts a selection. Nine months later the company has a better system running the same undiagnosed processes, and the problems that prompted the search are still there.
Or the opposite — nothing is touched for a year. The new CFO does not want to be the person who broke the close, so nothing changes until something breaks on its own. That is usually the quarter with the most at stake.
The regulated part is treated as somebody else's problem. Quality owns GxP, finance owns finance, and nobody owns the places they meet — inventory valuation on quarantined stock, the contract that carries both a payment term and a quality agreement, the batch that is on hold and on the balance sheet.
Operations. You know which processes are load-bearing and which are habit, and you know it from evidence rather than from the person who has been there longest.
Regulatory. You can say which finance-adjacent processes carry regulatory weight and which do not. You do not need to become a quality expert; you need to stop being surprised.
Capital. Whatever is coming — a filing, a raise, an audit, a sponsor — the control environment is being built toward it deliberately rather than discovered in diligence.
Global. If a second country is anywhere in the plan, the finance architecture anticipates it.
Honestly, this is the engagement where a fresh outside read is worth the most, because you are the one person in the building who cannot yet ask a naive question without it being interpreted.
We read the close, the systems, the org, and the last audit. We talk to the people who will tell an outsider what they would not tell their new boss in month two. You get a written baseline: what works, what is fragile, what is a genuine risk, and what the sequence should be. Yours to use however you like, including disagreeing with it.
Most of these begin as a targeted analysis — one question, ten business days, in writing.
Sometimes the question is simply what should I be worried about that nobody has told me. That is a legitimate question and a good use of ten days. We can have an NDA signed the day you ask.