It is a strange irony that the department responsible for measuring everyone else’s efficiency is usually the one with the least of it.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about why finance teams are consistently the last ones to see any of that transformation themselves. After all, they are the very people who sign off on the digital transformation budgets for every other department. We are seeing the classic case of the shoemaker’s children going barefoot. We’ve spent decades building complex castles of glass out of spreadsheets to keep the business running, while the rest of the company moved on to sleek, automated workflows.

In many ways, we are still living in the shadow of the spreadsheet. When it first arrived, it was a miracle. It gave the CFO a seat at the table because, for the first time, we could model the future rather than just report on the past. But that miracle has become a bit of a trap. We’ve ended up in a Cinderella position, relegated to the back office to keep the lights on while the rest of the business gets the shiny new toys.

The problem isn't a lack of desire to change, it’s a lack of breathing room. The finance calendar is a relentless treadmill. There is always another VAT filing, an audit, or a month-end close on the deadline horizon. When you are constantly under the pressure of a hard deadline, the idea of stopping to automate feels like a luxury you can’t afford. It’s the classic paradox of being so busy chopping a tree with a blunt saw that you don’t have the time to stop and sharpen it.

This lack of space creates a hidden fragility in the business. Those castles of glass I mentioned are often held together by the individual heroics of one or two people who understand how the master macros work. If they leave, or even if they just go on holiday, the reporting structure grumbles to a halt. Too often, we mistake manual workarounds for a process, but in reality, it is just a high-stakes key-person risk.

This fragility also makes us uncompetitive in the talent market. The younger generation entering the workforce doesn't have the patience for this kind of friction. They’ve grown up in an era where tech just works, and they are right to demand that same ease in their professional lives. If we hire the brightest graduates and then ask them to spend 80% of their time acting as a manual copy-paste bridge between a bank portal and an ERP, we shouldn't be surprised when they leave for a position that respects their talent.

This is compounded by a structural loss of agency.

For a long time, if a finance leader wanted to improve a process, they were forced to rely heavily on the IT department. You’d have to explain complex financial logic to a developer who didn't necessarily care about the nuances of bank API quirks or reconciliation logic. You’d get put on a roadmap for "next year," and by the time they built something, the business requirements had already shifted. This dependency has turned many finance teams into passive observers of their own technology.

I like to draw an analogy with the early days of the internet. As companies realised that they “need a website”, they put the responsibility onto the IT department because those were the people who understood technology. Today, corporate web presence is a communications function because the technology is no longer arcane. It just works.

The same shift is happening in finance. Technology for automation of finance systems is no longer stuck in the past or buried in code. Today’s tech is built with finance departments in mind. It is made in a way that can integrate with all other systems with immense ease. This gives the power back to the people who actually understand the financial logic.

Automation shouldn’t be a massive, eighteen-month IT project that requires you to shut down operations to upgrade. In today’s world, it should be more like plumbing. It’s about the ability to plumb in better solutions while the water is still running, without needing a developer in the room for every minor change. It’s about regaining the autonomy to build a department that functions as a strategic engine.

And when you automate much of the finance processes that can be automated, you give your team the time and space it needs to think in a way that’s properly strategic. You are doing to them today what the spreadsheet did to the previous generation.

When you regain that autonomy, the conversation in the boardroom changes. Currently, too many CFOs spend their time defending the integrity of the data, explaining why a number is what it is. When the system works, that debate disappears. You move from a defensive posture to an offensive one, where you are discussing the implications of the data rather than its accuracy.

Of course, the conversation right now is dominated by AI. But it is a bit like being told you need to sprint when you haven't yet mastered walking. AI holds immense promise, but it requires a level of technical precision that most "forgotten" finance stacks simply can't support yet. It is an area where we need to accurately separate the buzzwords from reality but that is a conversation for another time.

If we want the finance team to be the architects of the business, we have to stop asking them to spend 80% of their time acting as the manual data-entry layer between the bank and the ERP. It’s time we let the shoemaker’s children finally have some decent shoes.

James Camilleri

CEO at Fyorin