The Situation
When I took on the APAC CFO role at a global technology company, the region was scaling at a pace that had outrun its financial infrastructure entirely. Revenue went from $50m to $450m in twelve months across twelve countries. At the regional centre, there were two of us: myself and a financial controller.
Each country had its own accounting team and its own accounting system. There was no FP&A function anywhere in the region. And critically, there was no cash flow visibility whatsoever. The business knew it was growing. It had no idea what that growth actually looked like from a cash perspective.
That is the first thing any finance leader fixes. Everything else waits.
What We Built
The starting point was always going to be cash. I designed a cash flow template and trained the finance team in each of the twelve countries to produce it every week. Understanding historical cash flow patterns on a country-by-country basis was the foundation. You cannot forecast what you have not first measured.
From there, I extended the framework to a 13-week rolling cash flow forecast for each country, then consolidated all the information into a single regional view in USD. For the first time, we could see the region's cash position not as a collection of disconnected local snapshots, but as a single coherent picture.
Banking infrastructure was the next constraint. Twelve markets had accumulated multiple banking relationships with no central oversight. I consolidated all country bank accounts onto a single platform through HSBC, giving us real-time visibility and control across the region.
In parallel, my financial controller led the rollout of a single ERP system across the region. For the first six to nine months, before that was live, consolidated financials were being constructed manually from spreadsheets across entities with different ownership structures and multiple currencies. The cash flow framework carried the weight while the longer-term infrastructure caught up.
The Outcome
For the first time, regional leadership and global headquarters had genuine cash flow visibility across APAC. The consolidated view gave Chicago a level of clarity the region had never provided before.
They liked it enough to copy it. The cash flow template designed for APAC was subsequently adopted and rolled out globally across the entire business.
This is not something I discovered through experience. Every finance leader I respect starts in the same place: cash. It is the foundation on which every other financial decision is built. The twelve-country complexity, the hypergrowth, the manual consolidation, none of that changes the starting point. You get cash visibility first. Everything else follows.