What CFOs should review every Monday

What CFOs should review every Monday

1. Short introduction

For many CFOs, the week starts reacting to issues that already happened. A short, disciplined Monday review can change that dynamic and turn finance into a proactive function instead of a reporting one.

2. The problem finance teams face

Finance teams review plenty of information, but not always at the right cadence. Monthly reviews are too slow for operational decisions, while daily noise can distract from what actually matters. As a result, CFOs often find out about problems when they have already grown large enough to require painful fixes.

The real challenge is not access to data, but focus. Without a clear weekly framework, reviews become inconsistent: one week looking at revenue, the next at cash, the next reacting to ad-hoc questions. Over time, this leads to missed signals and reactive decision-making.

3. Why this is hard today (systems, NetSuite, processes)

Most finance systems are optimized for month-end close, not weekly decision-making. In NetSuite, core reports are built around accounting periods, and pulling a clean weekly view often requires manual adjustments or exports.

This creates friction. Reviewing weekly numbers means reconciling partial periods, explaining timing effects, and defending why figures don’t match the last closed month. Because of this overhead, many CFOs default to monthly reviews, even when the business moves faster than that.

The consequence is a gap between how often decisions are made and how often finance insights are reviewed.

4. How teams usually try to solve it (and why it fails)

Most teams take one of three approaches:

• Monthly-only reviews: Clean and accurate, but too late to influence short-term decisions.
• Weekly dashboards: Helpful for visibility, but often limited to top-line metrics without explanation.
• Ad-hoc deep dives: Triggered by problems rather than used systematically.

Dashboards in particular create a false sense of control. They show what changed, but rarely explain why. This leaves CFOs with more charts, but not more clarity. If you’ve experienced this, it’s often because dashboards don’t answer the underlying questions finance leaders care about.

5. What a better approach looks like (conceptual, practical)

An effective Monday review is not about covering everything. It’s about reviewing the few signals that indicate whether the business is on track.

A practical weekly review usually includes:

• Revenue vs expectations: Are we pacing as planned, and where are deviations coming from?
• Gross margin movement: Not the percentage alone, but what changed week over week.
• Cash and working capital: Directional trends in receivables, payables, and cash balance.
• Key anomalies: Anything unusual that requires attention before it compounds.

The goal is not perfect accuracy, but early signal detection. Weekly reviews should surface questions that deserve follow-up, not close the book on the numbers.

This approach also requires clarity on how movements are explained. Without a shared understanding of concepts like variance analysis, weekly reviews quickly turn into debates about methodology instead of discussions about action.

6. How modern finance teams handle this today

Modern finance teams treat the Monday review as part of their operating rhythm. They use it to align leadership around what changed, why it changed, and what needs attention this week.

Instead of manually pulling reports, they rely on systems that can explain movements in plain language and connect weekly trends to underlying drivers. This reduces prep time and keeps discussions focused on decisions rather than reconciliation.

This is also where tools like Simon fit naturally. By sitting on top of NetSuite, Simon helps finance teams quickly understand weekly changes in revenue, margin, and cash, and explain them without rebuilding reports every Monday. The result is not more data, but clearer conversations with the business.

Teams that adopt this rhythm often find that issues around margin, cash, or performance are caught earlier, when they are still easy to fix. This is especially important for CFOs who want to avoid being surprised later in the month when options are more limited.

7. Final takeaway

A strong Monday review is less about reporting and more about focus. CFOs don’t need to review everything every week, but they do need a consistent set of signals that show whether the business is drifting off course.

When weekly reviews are structured, explain changes clearly, and are easy to prepare, finance moves from reacting to problems to anticipating them. That shift is one of the most effective ways a CFO can increase their impact without adding complexity or headcount.