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If a business isn’t managing it’s finances, nothing else matters much.

We’ve touched on marketing and operations the last couple of weeks. These are important, but if you were going to use AI for anything in business, this may be the most important one.

Have you ever wondered how Enron happened? How a company that looked great on its income statement was actually a house of cards? It happened because key stakeholders weren't asking the right questions about how the financial statements interacted. 

Profit on paper meant nothing when the cash wasn't there.

Even if you’re not a public company, you should think of yourself as one… for both scale and scrutiny. You need to ask the tough questions a Wall Street-type analyst would ask.

As part of a NASDAQ-traded company, I was often surprised by the questions analysts didn’t ask during earnings calls.

They frequently missed the real story and vulnerabilities. I think it happens a lot.

Without a trusted CFO, you may be missing the insights that matter most. Today’s advice is how to use AI as your personal financial analyst to interrogate your business in a way that helps you know and grow.

Here is an improved prompt you can use with any LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.). It’s designed to be specific and force the AI to connect the dots between your statements.

Light/CFO version:
Add this prompt with your most recent financial statements*. If you don’t have recent financial statements, stop everything and get that in place first.

*Please remember that any data you load to an LLM should be anonymized and stripped of personally identifiable information. Also, remember to verify results as AI isn’t perfect.

“Act as a fractional Chief Financial Officer (CFO). I am providing you with my company's financial statements for [Last Quarter] and [This Month-to-Date].

Based on this data, please perform the following analysis:

1. KPI Analysis: Calculate and interpret key profitability, liquidity, and efficiency ratios.

2. Trend Analysis: Compare the current period to the last quarter and identify the most significant positive or negative trends.

3. Cash Flow Sanity Check: Analyze if our net income is converting into actual cash from operations.

4. Actionable Insights: Provide a prioritized list of the top 3 recommendations to improve the business, explaining the what, why, and how for each.”

Deeper/Analyst version:

See the doc here.

What surprised you in the results? Reply and let us know.

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