How often should a rolling forecast be updated?

Playworks, a national nonprofit, uses three cadences: revenue and pipeline weekly, the full forecast monthly, and a five-year projection with scenarios quarterly. Its CFO said the cadence matters less than validating the inputs that feed it.

How much cash should an organization hold in reserve?

Playworks requires six months of future operating expenses, a policy set with its board. Its CFO said the right level varies by organization and environment, but reserves should cover both bad news and unexpected opportunities.

What is the difference between leading and lagging financial indicators?

Lagging indicators, like financial statements, show where an organization is now. Leading indicators predict where it’s headed; the panel's examples were building permits for a city and, for an airline, on-time arrivals as a predictor of future ticket sales.. Building them requires a theory of what drives results.

How do you explain cash flow to a non-finance board?

Danielle Morris, founder of Triconal, uses AI to convert the standard (indirect) cash flow statement into the direct method, showing cash received from customers and paid to vendors. Non-finance board members, she said, grasp that immediately.

Why shouldn’t a nonprofit budget to break-even?

Playworks’ CFO said break-even budgets don’t generate cash. A modest planned surplus builds the reserves that let an organization absorb shortfalls without emergency cuts.

Planning Through Permanent Uncertainty: How Finance Leaders Forecast, Hold Cash and Keep Board Confidence

Scrubbed

Planning Through Permanent Uncertainty: How Finance Leaders Forecast, Hold Cash and Keep Board Confidence

At A Glance
Planning Through Permanent Uncertainty was the third panel at The Future Is Fractional 2026, hosted by Scrubbed on September 24, 2026. Scrubbed Chief Client Officer Darwin Pangilinan moderated a conversation with Satoshi Steimetz, CFO of Playworks; Naita Saechao Chialvo, a fractional CFO working with nonprofits, social enterprises and startups; and Danielle Morris, founder and chief strategist of a firm that guides entrepreneurial families through succession planning and governance. The panel covered rolling forecasts, leading indicators, scenario planning for global teams and policy shocks, cash reserves, and keeping a board’s confidence when assumptions shift. The short version: validate the inputs behind your forecast, hold enough cash to absorb surprises, and tell your board early.

For many finance teams, uncertainty is no longer an exception to plan around. It’s the condition they plan in. Funding shifts, tariff and tax policy changes, and regional shocks can all land inside a single budget cycle.

Session 3 of The Future Is Fractional 2026, a virtual conference hosted by finance and accounting advisory firm Scrubbed on September 24, 2026, moderated by Scrubbed Chief Client Officer Darwin Pangilinan, asked three finance and governance leaders how they built that reality into forecasting, cash management and board reporting.

Key Takeaways:
A late miss hurts more than a big one. Satoshi Steimetz, CFO of the nonprofit Playworks, said the size of a budget miss mattered less than how late it surfaced.
Run forecasts on three clocks. Review revenue and pipeline weekly, refresh the full forecast monthly and update a five-year projection with scenarios quarterly..
Validate the inputs. Scheduling a rolling forecast is easy; pressure-testing what feeds it is the hard part.
Pair lagging financials with leading indicators. Financial statements show where you are, not where you’re going.
Rehearse scenarios before you need them. Organizations that pivot quickly built and practiced their scenarios in advance, with the people who would carry them out.
Hold cash, and tell the board early. Six months of operating cash lets Playworks absorb shocks, and “confidence is not built on being right, it’s built on being early.

What is financial planning under uncertainty? It’s planning that assumes conditions will change inside the budget year. Based on this panel, that means frequent forecast cycles with validated inputs, leading indicators alongside financial statements, scenarios prepared before they’re needed, cash reserves to absorb shocks, and board updates that arrive early enough to act on.

Meet the Panel

Darwin Pangilinan (moderator): Chief Client Officer, Scrubbed.
Satoshi Steimetz: CFO, Playworks, a national nonprofit that brings play and recess to about 2,000 schools. His career includes Lucasfilm, AT&T and KPMG.
Naita Saechao Chialvo: Fractional CFOO and Consultant working across nonprofits, social enterprises and startups, with a background at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the d.school.
Danielle Morris: Founder and Chief Strategist, Triconal, Inc., guiding entrepreneurial families through succession and governance, and advising on cross-border transactions and international tax.

Rolling forecasts: from a monthly forecast to three clock

Steimetz opened with a miss. Playworks already ran a monthly profit-and-loss (P&L) and cash forecast, yet it missed its budget, and the miss surfaced in the last quarter of the fiscal year, leaving no time to react. “The size of the miss mattered less than how late it surfaced.”

The root cause was an input: the training sales pipeline was reviewed only quarterly and never pressure-tested. Here’s how the process changed:

	Before the miss	Now
Revenue and Pipeline	Pipeline values reviewed quarterly, not pressure-tested	Reviewed weekly in a working session, not a reporting session
Full Forecast	Monthly P&L and cash forecast	Refreshed monthly in Adaptive, on top of Sage Intacct actuals, with Salesforce pipeline feeding in
Long-term view	Not described	Five-year projection with scenarios, refreshed quarterly

Scheduling the forecast is the easy part. The hard parts are validating the inputs and making clear that forecasts lead to action, so the people preparing them have a stake in getting them right.

Shifting a Team from Static to Fluid Planning

Saechao Chialvo drew on design thinking and her work in the social innovation sector. In her view, two mindsets matter most:

Continuous improvement. Helping leaders “unlearn, relearn, rethink, and then relearn again.”
Comfort with ambiguity. Financials can feel set in stone, so she guides whole organizations through synthesizing data, generating insights and working scenario by scenario.

Leading vs. Lagging indicators

Morris pointed out that financial statements are lagging indicators. They show where you are, not where you’re going. Finance teams need models built on predictive indicators, the “windshield” rather than the rearview mirror.

Lagging Indicators Leading (Predictive) Indicators
What they tell you Where the organization is now Where it’s likely headed
Examples from the panel Financial statements; for an airline, today’s on-time arrival as a performance number For a city, building permits signaling future investment; for an airline, on-time arrival as a predictor of tomorrow’s ticket sales
What they require Accurate reporting A theory of cause and effect, time, and curiosity across finance, operations, human capital and the board

Scenario Planning for Global Teams and Policy Risk

	Lagging Indicators	Leading (Predictive) Indicators
What they tell you	Where the organization is now	Where it’s likely headed
Examples from the panel	Financial statements; for an airline, today’s on-time arrival as a performance number	For a city, building permits signaling future investment; for an airline, on-time arrival as a predictor of tomorrow’s ticket sales
What they require	Accurate reporting	A theory of cause and effect, time, and curiosity across finance, operations, human capital and the board

Act on unclear information. Morris told the story of a school principal during recent floods in Nepal who heard inconclusive rumors of a wall of water and moved 900 students to high ground before it destroyed the school. Finance, she argued, needs the same capacity: model what-if scenarios and know your tolerances before the answer is certain.

Co-design the framework. Saechao Chialvo emphasized “process over the product.” At READ Global, a nonprofit that builds community library and resource centers in South Asia,where she was present for the 2015 Nepal earthquakes and later navigated COVID, the team built its disaster framework with staff from all four country offices, working through each country’s likely disasters together. Tying the framework to the financials helped the organization raise support and persuade donors to loosen restrictions on how their grants could be spent, restrictions that could have blocked a response. The team built a separate framework for growth decisions and revisits it each year.

Model policy shocks. Morris noted that tax policy usually moves slowly, but not always. She recalled the 2017 U.S. tax overhaul that changed international tax almost overnight, leaving advisors roughly eight days to respond. For cross-border operations, she advised modeling scenarios, tracking international tax rules from the OECD and local changes, and considering ownership structures that add treaty protections in riskier countries. During the Arab Spring, she noted, Egyptian businesses with foreign parent companies benefited from those treaties.

Fund the overhead that makes pivots possible. Organizations that pivot quickly, Morris said, invested in that capacity beforehand. She compared it to military war games: rehearse the scenarios so institutional memory exists when you need it. In a crisis, she said, protect people first, then property and money.

Moving fast because the Homework was done

Steimetz described a spring when three pressures converged on Playworks: uncertain federal education funding, cuts to the Medicaid reimbursement school districts receive for student health services, which squeezed district budgets. . Building its fiscal 2027 budget, the team concluded “you just can’t simply budget your way through this uncertainty.”

Within roughly one quarter it made three moves:

Walked away from a large federal service program that the math said wasn’t paying off.
Eliminated a management layer.
Consolidated smaller regions.

Earlier work, including organizational surveys and contribution margin analysis, had already pointed the way. The macro pressure “just accelerated our decisions to act on them.”

Cash reserves: How much buffer is enough?

Steimetz’s most important lever is cash. Playworks requires enough cash to cover six months of future operating expenses, a policy the board has embraced. He was clear that the right number varies by organization. What matters is having enough to absorb bad news and seize opportunities. “If you’re living check-to-check, you can’t do any of those things.”

Building a finance team that can expand and contract

Core plus flex. Since people are usually the largest cost, Saechao Chialvo favors a core internal finance team, whatever its size, plus the ability to flex up and down with outside support. Deep expertise for mergers or scaling is often missing internally, and in donor-funded organizations expansion work is rarely funded. She said Scrubbed has been a consistent partner in helping her organizations flex.

Build redundancy into leadership. Morris pointed to the Marine Corps, where people have done the role beneath them before they move up. Teaching the next person the next step prepares an organization for the resignations, departures and illnesses every organization faces. Leaders should also reward decisions made under uncertainty, even imprecise ones.

KPIs for an uncertain year

Saechao Chialvo: Help leaders trust their own instincts about which KPIs matter. With one organization, she built an impact measure around “hearts” (the depth of change in each person served) rather than lives reached, mapped back to financial markers.
Steimetz: Six months of cash, the organization-wide mantra and the leading indicator for this year and beyond.
Morris: Pair performance indicators with predictive ones.

Board Communication: Early, clear and decision-ready

Translate the statements. Morris said most boards glaze over financial statements. She used AI to convert an indirect cash flow statement into the direct method, showing cash from customers and payments to vendors, which non-finance leaders grasp immediately.
Be early. Steimetz said boards expect assumptions to change and lose confidence only when they learn of a change too late to act. “Confidence is not built on being right, it’s built on being early with the information.”
Communicate by design. Saechao Chialvo stressed shared values and a deliberate communication format: give stakeholders the information they need, in a form they trust, to answer the questions they have right now.

Pangilinan’s summary: the thread through every answer was trust.

One habit for the next budget cycle

Steimetz: Stop budgeting toward break-even. It’s fine for a nonprofit to run a modest surplus that builds reserves.
Saechao Chialvo: Build scenarios, including wild ones and ones that pull away from the original mission.
Morris: Run two budgets, the hoped-for sales budget and a cash-protective one, and ask what you’d need to do today to reach 2X or survive at half your revenue. Finance is often the only team thinking about it.

On tools, Saechao Chialvo suggested starting from existing templates or accounting software, noting AI still needs human input to get a budget right. Steimetz said that across 16 regions and 12 departments, spreadsheets are no longer an option.

This session is part of TFIF 2026. To see how planning connects to talent, AI and team design, read, read Own the Core, Access the Rest: What The Future is Fractional (TFIF) 2026 Revealed About How Finance Teams Are Being Rebuilt what finance leaders are rethinking about talent, AI and team structure.

Stop finding out about budget misses in the fourth quarter.

Early warnings depend on forecasts someone updates every week. This is the work our FP&A and fractional CFO professionals take responsibility for. We run rolling forecasts, track cash and build the scenarios your board needs, so leadership hears about changes in time to act on them.

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Session 5, the closing session of The Future Is Fractional 2026, a virtual conference hosted by finance and accounting advisory firm Scrubbed on September 24, 2026, took on those questions. Scrubbed Chief Marketing Officer Debra Andrews walked through four decision points with Ottavio Siani, a fractional CFO who also runs his own multi-location business, so he sees both the advice and the result. Key Takeaways: Divide work by context. In-house staff handle what’s new and unusual; a partner handles the routine. Vet partners on workload, industry fit and software knowledge, not just price. Four or five clients per accountant is a good answer, in Siani’s view . Be skeptical of full-automation promises. Several of his clients’ books went unclosed for months after trying them. Set cadences and communication rules early. Review cash weekly and the close monthly, and agree on response times. Bring the existing team along. Show them the work they’ll gain time for. 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Data, Cash and Deal Readiness: Finance Lessons for Scaling Technology Companies

The Technology Spotlight was one of three industry spotlights at The Future Is Fractional 2026, hosted by Scrubbed on September 24, 2026. Anthony John Rogador, Accounting Advisory Services Manager at Scrubbed, spoke with Abdul Wahab Zafar, SVP of Finance at Studycast, who has led M&A integrations and financial systems consolidations at fast-scaling companies. They covered building a single source of truth, rationalizing the tech stack, forecasting usage-based revenue by cohort, managing cash with payment terms, and preparing a back office for M&A. The short version: tie customer, contract and billing data together, hold payment terms firm, and operate as if you might sell tomorrow. Fast-growing technology companies tend to add tools faster than they connect them. Finance ends up consolidating data from systems that don’t agree, forecasting revenue that won’t sit still, and hoping the back office holds up if an acquirer calls. At The Future Is Fractional 2026, a virtual conference hosted by finance and accounting advisory firm Scrubbed on September 24, 2026, Session 4 split into three industry breakouts running at the same time: real estate, nonprofit and technology. In the technology track, Scrubbed Accounting Advisory Services Manager Anthony John Rogador spoke with Abdul Wahab Zafar, SVP of Finance at Studycast, who has run M&A integrations and systems consolidations at fast-scaling companies. Key Takeaways: Accurate financials start upstream. Customer, contract and billing data need a common key tying them together. 90–95% data alignment is often enough. The last last few percent can cost more than it’s worth. Forecast usage-based revenue by cohort . In Zafar's experience, a cohort’s second year grows fastest, then growth settles to low single digits. Protect cash with payment terms. Hold customer terms firm and negotiate longer vendor terms to create a cushion. Operate as if you’ll sell tomorrow. Buyers judge revenue by how well customer, contract and billing data tie out. Don't rush to merge systems after a deal. Move acquired customers into the process that already works. Meet the Speakers Anthony John Rogador (moderator): Accounting Advisory Services Manager, Scrubbed. [LINK: LinkedIn] Abdul Wahab Zafar, MBA, CMA : Senior Vice President of Finance, Studycast, with experience leading M&A integration, financial systems consolidation and scaling finance operations at fast-growing companies .  Building a Single Source of Truth upstream Finance, Zafar said, takes data from everywhere else and consolidates it. So accurate financials start 'on the head of the pipe,' with customer data. He thinks of each data set as a 'cube,' and the order matters: customer first, then contract, then billing, then vendors. Data Set The Question To Answer Customer Data  Who is buying from you, and is that record correct? Contract Data  What exactly did they buy? 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Rationalizing the tech stack before adding tools New finance tools launch constantly. Zafar’s discipline before buying one Identify the actual problem you’re solving, in depth. Check whether your current systems can solve it . Many companies use only part of what a platform like NetSuite can do. Only then evaluate third-party options, with a clear picture of what you need. Keep it simple. The fix is sometimes the smallest tool on the market and don't create processes 'just to make it look like you're doing a good job.' Complexity has a staffing cost. “If it’s more complicated processes, then a lot of times you need a bigger team to manage those processes,” and most small and mid-sized finance teams run lean. Forecasting Usage-based Revenue by cohort Usage-based revenue billed on how much customers use the product, not a flat fee) shifts with business days, holidays and seasonality. As Zafar put it, 'It's not as simple as, the customer signed a $12,000 contract, my revenue is $1,000 a month.' Studycast groups customers into cohorts by the year they went live, because cohorts tend to behave consistently over time. Cohort Year Typical growth, in Zafar's experience Why Year 1  Partial year Customers go live partway through the year Year 2  Roughly 70% to 100% The first full year of revenue Years 3-4 onward  Around 4–5% a year Growth declines sharply, then settles Forecasting each cohort separately is more reliable than projecting the whole customer base at once. Separating enterprise and small-business customers to handle outliers The outliers at Studycast, single customers growing 100% or more a year, were mostly enterprise customers who went live at one site, then rolled out to others, compounding revenue month after month. The team now forecasts SMB and enterprise customers separately. Finance can’t forecast enterprise accounts alone, he added. Customer success and sales know whether an account is at capacity or has room to expand, which turns the forecast from “just a number on the paper” into a strategic decision. AI in Finance: Faster automation, Higher stakes for Data integrity Zafar sees AI making finance both easier and harder. It already helps automate bank and account reconciliations, reporting and financial decks. But deeper uses, such as combining data points to analyze a customer fully, depend on data that lines up across systems. Without that common hook, “it’s essentially garbage in, garbage out,” and AI may point you the wrong way. His team has also implemented third-party tools that automate accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP), significantly reducing processing time. They aren't cheap, he said, but they're 'not the Mercedes of the brands.' He spends two to four hours a week learning AI himself and encourages his team to practice and fail with it. “If you don’t do it, you’re gonna get left behind.” Managing Cash Flow with Payment Terms Predictable cash starts with predictable payment terms. “You live and die with your collections.” Net 20 means payment is due 20 days after the invoice date. Customer Terms (receivables) Vendor Terms (payables) Target   Net 20     Net 45, sometimes settling at net 30 How it’s held    Sales can’t change terms without finance approval; about 95% of customers are on net 20 Negotiate everything with vendors Exceptions Mostly larger customers or trades for something else Varies by vendor Support Dedicated people or systems chase late payers AP automation reduces processing time At those terms, collecting at net 20 and paying at net 30 to 45 works out to a cushion of 10 to 25 days. Not every customer pays on time, he acknowledged. The goal is for most (60–70%) to pay promptly and to have people or systems chasing the rest. M&A Due Diligence: Evaluating a Back office Zafar has been on both sides of deals. As the buyer, he starts with the P&L and balance sheet, but he spends most of his time on customer data. He pulls customer, contract and billing data and tries to merge them. If they tie out easily, revenue evaluation is straightforward. If not, the gaps tell him how much to trust the reported revenue. Most of the time the revenue is real, he said; the hard part is pinpointing the contract and customer behind it. As the seller, he makes sure the customer-to-billing chain is as accurate as possible, even if it lives in Excel, so the company can show the strength of its data. Just as important, finance, sales, customer success and the CRO should all tell the same story. Post-acquisition integration: don’t rush the systems The most common trap, Zafar said, is rushing to merge financial systems. The better move is to understand how data flows from customer to contract to billing, then move the acquired customers into your existing process. “If we are acquiring a business, we’re acquiring revenue.” Don’t break a process that works just to force systems together. Before closing, he said, the one thing finance leaders should understand is the target's billing process, from identifying a customer to signing a contract to sending an invoice. Finance is usually more involved before a deal closes, so it can then guide sales and revenue operations on how to bring that data across. Vendor data, by comparison, is 'a pretty easy lift.' M&A readiness checklist, drawn from the session Can every customer be traced across customer, contract and billing records with one common key? Would your customer-to-billing data tie out if a buyer tried to merge it? Do finance, sales, customer success and revenue leadership tell the same story about customers? Are payment terms consistent, and are exceptions approved and documented? Before closing a deal, do you understand the target’s billing process end to end? Rogador’s closing thought: Getting financial systems and data right doesn’t start when the deal shows up. It’s what makes you ready when it does. This session is part of The Future is Fractional 2026. For how deal readiness connects to the wider shift in finance team design, read Own the Core, Access the Rest: What The Future is Fractional (TFIF) 2026 Revealed About How Finance Teams Are Being Rebuilt   what finance leaders are rethinking about talent, AI and team structure.

Building a Resilient Nonprofit Finance Function When Funding Is Unpredictable

The Nonprofit Spotlight was one of three industry spotlights at The Future Is Fractional 2026, hosted by Scrubbed on September 24, 2026. Laurence Ruelo, Director of Business Development at Scrubbed, spoke with Costa John of CFO Assignments, who has decades of CFO experience across nonprofit and for-profit organizations. They covered the three pillars of financial resilience, tracking restricted funds, what to do when a major funder pulls out, board reporting, and how to build finance capacity without overbuilding. The short version: watch unrestricted cash, act early and in phases when funding is cut, and give your board the forward look rather than the history. For many nonprofits, the funding hasn’t disappeared, but its timing has become harder to predict. Grants arrive late. Proposals take longer to secure. Visibility six or twelve months out is thin. At The Future Is Fractional 2026, a virtual conference hosted by finance and accounting advisory firm Scrubbed on September 24, 2026, Session 4 split into three industry breakouts running at the same time: real estate, nonprofit and technology. In the nonprofit track, Scrubbed Director of Business Development Laurence Ruelo asked veteran CFO Costa John how nonprofits can build a finance function that is resilient, useful to leadership and scalable when resources are already stretched. Key Takeaways: Resilience rests on three legs: liquidity, flexibility and the cash cycle. Timesheets and integration drive restricted fund tracking. Programs are delivered by people, so staff time is what releases restricted funds. When funding is cut, act early and in phases. The first cost reductions are the cheapest ones. Don't hire strategy to fix bookkeeping. Get the books closing cleanly before bringing in a fractional CFO, or the CFO gets pulled back into reconciliations. Give boards the forward look, not the history. Show the outlook, its impact and a range of decisions. Watch operating cash flow, and show days of cash. “Reserves and profits are a matter of opinion. Cash is a matter of fact.” What is nonprofit financial resilience? It’s an organization’s ability to keep delivering its mission when funding is delayed, reduced or withdrawn. In John’s framing, that depends on having unrestricted funds(money not tied to a specific grant or purpose) available, enough cash on hand to absorb delays and a clear view of how long the organization must pay its costs before funding arrives. Meet the Speakers Laurence Ruelo ( moderator): Director of Business Development, Scrubbed. Costa John : CEO CFO Assignments, with decades of CFO experience across nonprofit and for-profit organizations, including as CFO of Sapiens North America.  The Three Pillars of Nonprofit Financial Resilience John frames resilience as a three-legged stool: Liquidity: The level of unrestricted funds the organization can draw on. Flexibility : The cushion to absorb a delayed grant or a slow proposal. The board usually sets it with the CFO as a target number of months of cash operating expenses. The cash cycle: How many days the organization must cover rent, salaries, travel and office costs before funding arrives. Together, they give the organization a stable footing. John acknowledged it’s hard for small nonprofits, but said building toward it should be a priority. How to Track Restricted Funds without the Spreadsheet Wrestling Match Restricted funds are grants or donations that can be spent only on a specific purpose or program. Start with timesheets. Nonprofit programs are delivered by people, so releasing restricted funds and matching expenses to grants comes down to how staff time is spent. “If you cannot have a good on-hand grip of where and how your program people are delivering against the mission, you’re already on a slippery slope." Integrate the systems. The more the organization’s systems connect end to end, the less restricted revenue tracking becomes “a wrestling match between confusing and sometimes broken spreadsheets.” Affordable, easier-to-integrate software has made that more realistic than it used to be. Contingency planning when a major funder pulls out Stay close to funders. Organizations with strong funder relationships can often see cuts coming, whether funders planned them or are reacting to their own budget pressures. Have the outline of a plan ready. John described a phased response, from least to most disruptive: Delay contractors and capital spending not required this year. Delay replacements when people resign. Delay salary increases. Delay benefits such as 401(k) matches. Only if those steps don’t buy enough time, consider reductions in force. Act early. Once you know funding is going away, move. “Your first cost reduction steps are ironically your cheapest ones.” Hesitating can make the eventual response more painful and more expensive. Board Reporting: Forward-looking Information, Not just data “Data is not the same as information,” John said. Boards can drown in numbers. He recommended spending little time on historical statements beyond a status update. “It’s hard asking a board to govern an organization looking in the rearview mirror.” Include in Board Updates What It Means The forward look The outlook for the coming period The impact If this happens, here's what it means financially Decisions,plural A range of choices and their impacts, not a single option to approve or reject Non-financial metrics, with the CFO at the table John pushed back on the idea that non-financial metrics are outside the CFO’s lane. Measures like schools reached, children served or outcomes achieved all have financial drivers underneath, and the CFO can help program leaders see the dollar value of their impact. He sees a missed opportunity with funders: payback . In one illustration, a program costing about $72,000 per school produces an estimated $112,000 per school in lifetime health and education benefits. Framed that way, funders hear two things: the program pays for itself, and more money would do more good. Aligning boards on cash reserves Reserves aren’t shareholders’ equity. John warned that board members without a finance background shouldn't read nonprofit reserves that way. Restricted reserves reported under GAAP are, in economic substance, obligations to deliver future programs, and the cash to deliver them needs to be available. Deficits change the math. With $10 million in grant revenue and $12 million in expenses, every dollar of programming costs $1.20. Delivering more of it without a plan to close the gap can dig the hole deeper, so healthy-looking reserves can offer “a comfort that turns out to be razor thin.” Boards don’t need the calculations, he said, but they should know to ask. Scaling Finance Capacity: Compliance vs. Value-added work Executive directors already juggle fundraising, programs, people and operations. John divides finance into two parts, with different ways to resource each: Non-negotiable: compliance and reporting Value-added: strategy and planning What it covers The Form 990, the audit, paying vendors, payroll Forecasting, budgeting, support at the fundraising and budget tables The risk It “can become a self-consuming monster” without integration and automation It gets crowded out if the CFO is pulled into bookkeeping How John would resource it Outsource it, or at minimum keep it separate from the CFO role A part-time or fractional CFO, kept out of the bookkeeping weeds Don’t hire strategy to fix bookkeeping. Bringing in a fractional CFO for strategic work while the books still don’t close cleanly means the CFO gets dragged back into reconciliations, “the most expensive way to solve the wrong problem.” Messy reconciliations also pull program leaders away from the mission. Start with the lightest system that works . John warned against buying the most sophisticated accounting system too early. A lightweight option such as QuickBooks with nonprofit modules usually serves growing organizations better, while complex systems can “grind the process to a halt.” Ruelo agreed, noting organizations that implement complex systems, don’t get the information they need and end up returning to simpler tools. Non-financial metrics, with the CFO at the table A dedicated CFO role, even a part-time or fractional one, onshore or offshore, kept out of the bookkeeping weeds . Relationship-driven roles such as the grant accountant, who knows program leaders, funders and nuances that may not translate if outsourced. The metric every Nonprofit leader should watch: Operating cash flow “Reserves and profits are a matter of opinion. Cash is a matter of fact.” A balance sheet can look healthy while cash is tied up in grants not yet funded, and “you cannot make payroll with grant certificates or invoices.” John recommended practicing short-horizon cash forecasting, starting at 30 and 60 days, until it becomes muscle memory, especially as the funding environment for nonprofits shifts. One Change to the Board packet: An Unrestricted Cash Schedule What to cut: Liability-side schedules, such as an accounts payable aging report showing how long vendors have waited to be paid. John called that too operational to help a board make a decision. What to add: a schedule showing how many days the organization can run on unrestricted cash. Start with unrestricted reserves. Subtract amounts already committed. Divide by daily cash expenses. The board then knows, at every meeting, how many days the organization can operate: 111 days, say, or 192. It's easy to focus on and easy to understand. Ruelo’s summary of the conversation:   Resilience starts with visibility, good reporting translates information into decisions, and finance capacity is about access to the right expertise at the right time, whether internal, fractional, outsourced or a mix. This session is part of The Future is Fractional 2026. For the themes that ran across every industry, read Own the Core, Access the Rest: What The Future is Fractional (TFIF) 2026 Revealed About How Finance Teams Are Being Rebuilt   what finance leaders are rethinking about talent, AI and team structure.