/company-cfo

CFO workflow traps

Universal categorization + reconciliation traps that recur across CFO workflows. Check each every monthly run.

Cash-vs-credit double-count

If your bank shows a monthly "credit card autopay" outflow AND the credit card account shows individual charges, counting both double-counts every SaaS bill.

Fix: Filter to cash accounts only when computing outflows. Treat the credit card as a debt account (individual charges are visible on the CC statement, but the CC autopay from checking is what actually leaves cash).

Alternative: treat the CC individual charges as your source of truth and exclude the autopay from cash outflow analysis. Both work — pick one and lock it.

Internal transfers

Transfers between your own accounts (Checking ↔ Savings, brokerage ↔ checking, subsidiary ↔ parent) net to zero within the company but appear as separate transactions.

Fix: Filter out kind=internalTransfer (or equivalent) OR match by account-pair-and-timestamp OR sum only OUTGOING transactions to accounts you don't own.

Common gotcha: sweep accounts (auto-move idle cash to savings for yield) generate internal transfers daily. Include them in the exclusion filter.

Currency mismatches

Contractor payment tools often return destination_amount in the worker's payout currency (JPY, EUR, GBP, INR, etc.) — not USD.

Fix: Always use source_amount (or equivalent — different tools name it differently) for base-currency cost analysis.

Common tools + right field:

• Plane: funding.amount (USD funding) vs destination_amount (worker's local currency) → use funding.amount
• Deel: source_amount vs destination_amount → use source_amount
• Gusto (US-only): USD everywhere, no ambiguity
• Wise Business: check the API docs — the naming varies by endpoint

Distribution count mismatch

If N partners should get a monthly distribution and only N-1 appear in the bank data, flag the missing partner.

Common causes:

• One partner is deferring their draw to preserve cash
• One partner's ACH bounced or was rejected (rare, but worth catching)
• Distribution was routed to a different account than usual (e.g., moving from personal checking to an LLC-owned brokerage)
• The payroll platform processed the distribution as a W-2 payment instead of an owner draw (common when there's a comp-structure change mid-month)

Fix: Ask leadership to confirm — don't guess. The report should note which N-1 distributions occurred + flag the missing one.

Held deductions residual

Total payroll debits in the bank rarely EXACTLY match payroll-tool API totals — there's usually a small residual ($100-$2K) from held deductions:

• Retirement contributions held for the 401k custodian
• Benefits held for insurance carriers
• Tax withholdings held for quarterly payment
• Garnishments (rare but real)
• Corrections + adjustments applied later

Fix: Allow ~$1K-$2K residual as normal. Flag anything bigger — that's usually a missed transaction or a categorization bug.

Cash-basis vs accrual lag (expense management)

Expense management tools (Ramp / Brex / Divvy) show WHEN expenses were submitted / approved. Bank shows WHEN reimbursement was PAID OUT.

These can lag 1-4 weeks. Reconciliation between expense-mgmt total and bank total will always show a delta.

Fix: Use bank as the source of truth for cash-basis reporting (matches what actually left the account). Use expense-mgmt for spend-by-category reporting (matches spend by category). Note the two in the report — they're different lenses on different questions.

Payment processor lag

Payment processors (Stripe, etc.) charge customers on day X but payout to your bank on day X+2 or later. Monthly Stripe payout cadence lands the whole month's revenue at EOM.

Fix: For MRR + revenue reporting, use processor API (charges) as source of truth. For cash-in-bank reporting, use bank inflows. They will not match — that's expected — but they should be reconcilable via known payout schedules.

Missing revenue sources (invisible in primary processor)

If you bill through multiple platforms (Stripe + Paddle, Stripe + direct invoicing, Stripe + a marketplace's payment intermediary), the primary processor's MRR is an undercount.

Fix: Add all revenue sources to your CLAUDE.md methodology. Query each independently. Reconcile against bank inflows.

Common example: SaaS with a primary Stripe subscription AND a "Mallow-style" secondary invoicing platform. Stripe MRR shows $80K; total revenue from all sources is $95K. Reporting Stripe MRR only understates cash generation.

Software baseline drift

The monthly SaaS bill (dominated by autopay from corporate cards) shifts as tools are added / removed. Model the current baseline, not last year's — a stale baseline creates optimistic cash projections.

Fix: Every quarter, review the actual last-3-month software autopay average. Update baselineMrr and OPEX_DEFAULTS in the projector to match. Don't project with a lower software baseline "to be conservative" — the projection is inaccurate.

Categorization drift mid-year

Changing how a category is defined mid-year makes trends unreadable. If June's "software" category includes AI subscriptions but May's didn't, month-over-month software growth is noise.

Fix: Lock categories at the start of the fiscal year. If a new expense type appears that doesn't fit, add a new category at year-end + document in the memory note. See categorization.md.

Partner comp-structure changes

If a partner's W-2 salary decreases by $X and their monthly distribution increases by $X, total comp is unchanged. But the "team" (payroll) line drops and the "distributions" line rises — this WILL show up as a trend break in your monthly charts.

Fix: Note comp-structure changes in the "why" paragraph. Don't read the team-line drop as a real cost decrease.

The cash floor applies to the LOW, not the EOM HIGH

EOM cash is the cycle HIGH (Stripe payout just landed). Most of the month you're at the intramonth LOW.

Fix: Weekly cash pulse (weekly mode of this skill) monitors the low. Cash floor checks apply to the low. See eom-cash-methodology.md for the intramonth-low formulas by payout cadence.

Add your own

Every CFO workflow discovers company-specific traps over time. Document them in your ${COMPANY_CFO_ROOT}/CLAUDE.md under a "Traps documented for this company" section. This file is the universal starter; your company's CLAUDE.md is where the specific muscle memory lives.