The Last Generation of Spreadsheet CFOs.
You remember the £1.37 that wouldn't reconcile. Your successor never will.
Automation, AI and real-time platforms are taking over the work that once defined a finance career: building, reconciling, consolidating and checking. The generation that learned the job cell by cell, late nights and all, is now running finance, and may be the last to learn it that way.
That apprenticeship taught more than spreadsheet mechanics. It taught intimacy with the numbers, instinct for when a figure looked wrong, and scepticism worth handing down. The next generation will arrive with far more capability and far less of that grounding.
This report traces how the spreadsheet shaped the modern CFO, what it cost the profession along the way, and what a finance team needs to deliberately teach when the grid is no longer the classroom.
What's inside
- A short history of the tools that built modern finance, from VisiCalc to AI in the finance function.
- What the spreadsheet apprenticeship gave finance leaders, and the hidden cost of the hours it took.
- How reconciliation, forecasting, close and board commentary are already being done differently.
- What to test for when hiring the next generation of finance leaders, now the grid is optional.