Why the Future CFO Looks More Like a COO

Tim Minahan, Chief Strategy Officer at OneStream, sits down with Philip Kaszuba, co-Founder of infinitySPM. They discuss how Finance is moving beyond reporting and becoming a more active driver of operational decision-making.

For years, Finance was measured by how effectively it reported on the business. That responsibility is now expanding. IDC predicts that, by 2028, half of CFOs will take on COO-like responsibilities. That shift reflects the growing expectation that Finance not only explains performance, but helps guide it.

We’ve heard that theme repeatedly through our Finance 2035 research and ongoing conversations with Finance leaders around the world. This pattern shows up in most organizations we speak with, in a specific form. Finance is asked to underwrite a revenue plan it did not help build, using assumptions it cannot inspect. And they’re expected to do it on a timeline that makes correction impossible by the time the variance appears.

In the Forward Finance framework, we call this dimension the Chief Operator. Chief Operators are Finance leaders who connect financial insight to operational action and help the business move more quickly and confidently.

But Finance can't make that shift alone.

Increasingly, Finance is accountable for revenue outcomes it does not control:

• The capacity Finance funded
• The quota plan Finance approved
• The pipeline behind the forecast Finance guided to

Philip Kaszuba, InfinitySPM co-founder, has spent decades building the models that connect those decisions, from territory and quota design to capacity planning and incentive compensation. We talked about what changes when the commercial plan and the financial plan become one plan — and what stubbornly does not.

For decades, Finance closed the books and explained what happened, while revenue operations focused on what the business needed to make happen next. Those functions worked on different assumptions and often built different views of the same business.

Today, that split is collapsing. Finance is being pulled into the operating rhythm of the business, while RevOps is being pulled toward forecasting discipline, unit economics, and accountability for the assumptions behind the revenue plan.

We started InfinitySPM because we repeatedly saw the same problem: Finance and sales were working toward the same outcome without a shared plan. When operating from one view, the teams can connect the annual financial plan to territories, quotas, capacity, pipeline, and compensation. The teams can also then keep those elements aligned as conditions change. The compensation plan is where that alignment either holds or breaks. It’s the one part of the plan every rep actually reads.

The two functions are not converging by accident. They’re converging because the business can no longer accept two versions of the truth.

No, and the exception is the point. In software and many services businesses, RevOps developed as a distinct function. The function emerged because the revenue motion is complex, rep-driven, and separate from the physical delivery of a product. As Finance is increasingly asked to move beyond reporting results and help shape operational decisions, those organizations are bringing Finance and RevOps closer together.

Manufacturing, distribution, and life sciences work differently. In those industries, revenue cannot be separated from supply, production capacity, lead times, inventory, and the cost of delivering what Sales promises.

In many of those industries, Finance has always played a more operational role because revenue planning, capacity planning, and profitability planning are deeply intertwined. The shift from historian to operator is still happening, but often looks less dramatic because Finance has never sat entirely on the sidelines.

In those industries, the operating questions often already sit inside Finance, even when nobody uses the term "RevOps." Teams still face the same challenge of bringing customer relationship management (CRM) data together with accounting and planning data. Now, however, Finance has a more direct line of sight into the operational constraints behind the forecast.

You don’t want Sales selling something the company cannot build, nor do you want Supply Chain building something Sales cannot sell. The unified plan keeps strategic alignment, leading to higher growth for the business

RevOps can give Finance a stronger seat at the operating table. In the industries mentioned above, Finance never really left the table.

Two reasons. First, the revenue plan often doesn’t have the same formal ownership. In software, revenue planning typically lives with a RevOps team and a unique set of tools. In manufacturing and life sciences, the revenue plan is usually a set of assumptions shared across the Finance and Sales teams. Bringing the plan into Finance fills a gap rather than replaces something.

Second, Finance already owns the planning platform and the planning calendar. Extending that plan to territories and quotas keeps accountability in one place instead of splitting accountability across two executive sponsors with competing scorecards.

Shared data doesn’t just make decisions faster. It also removes the argument about whose number is right. The first and most immediate decision is revenue forecasting. As soon as the year begins, plans change. Teams are then constantly reforecasting, reconsidering hiring, and testing whether the growth strategy still holds. With a shared model, Finance and Sales have one place to see — and then resolve — differences between the top-down financial plan and bottom-up revenue view.

From there, other decisions become connected rather than isolated:

• Capacity planning can link headcount and quota to the revenue outlook:
• Pipeline management can reveal whether the forecast is supported by deal-stage reality.
• Territory planning can reflect market opportunity, account coverage, and available resources.
• Quota setting can be tested against the financial target before plans go out.
• Compensation design can be modeled for cost and behavior before being rolled out.
• Growth investments can be evaluated against the people, channels, and capacity required to execute the investments.

The goal isn’t simply to create another dashboard. The goal is also to create a trusted, deterministic model for decisions that affect compensation, accruals, and the revenue plan. Forecasts can be directional. Compensation cannot. You cannot pay someone off a model you cannot explain. Once revenue forecasting and growth strategy are aligned, capacity, pipeline, and territory decisions become part of the same operating conversation.

A variance report is an autopsy. Nobody invites the coroner to the strategy meeting. While useful, reporting numbers doesn’t help the business align around a plan, take advantage of opportunities, or correct problems while there’s still time to act.

To earn an earlier seat, Finance needs operational fluency and a point of view. That means understanding what’s happening in the pipeline now, being able to explain the assumptions beneath the forecast, and translating those signals into a recommendation. “Here is what we should do” changes the conversation in a way that “here is what happened” cannot.

Finance also needs timely access to the operating data behind the plan. Having the right data and recommendations creates the opportunity to participate. Judgment, backed by defensible assumptions, is what gives Finance a vote.

Misalignment rarely arrives as one dramatic failure. More often, misalignment becomes friction that everyone learns to live with. RevOps builds a bottom-up view from the pipeline, while Finance builds a top-down view from the annual plan. The two views meet late, after teams have already made decisions. As a result, the conversation becomes a reconciliation exercise instead of a strategy discussion.

The hidden cost is time. Teams debate metrics, investigate differences, and rebuild assumptions before deciding anything. One customer’s leadership team had spent weeks tying plans together to the penny. After the planning process was automated with shared workflows and business rules, the organization estimated it saved 1,500 hours of leadership time. That savings led to more time for creating more strategic initiatives to drive growth for the business.

The same friction shows up in compensation. When quotas come from one model and the financial plan from another, the result is a whole lot of friction:

• Quota disputes
• Manual adjustments
• Reps keeping their own shadow calculations
• Commission expense that surprises Finance at quarter-end

The solution is a single view that does the following:

• Translates the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) plan into a revenue and sales plan
• Exposes the deltas
• Allows both teams to resolve them using the same data

Misalignment isn’t a soft cost. It’s a recurring tax on decision speed and growth.

The shift is happening, but not evenly. In the old model, the CFO was casted as the historian who closed the quarter, reported the variance, and moved on. The emerging model brings Finance into key decisions:

• Where the next dollar of investment should go
• How the company will staff its growth plan
• What operational constraints could prevent the forecast from becoming reality

The shift is especially visible when supply and demand enter the forecast. In manufacturing, for example, the revenue conversation quickly expands to product availability, market coverage, capacity, and the cost of delivering the plan. Finance is positioned to connect those dimensions, but only if the team can see the operating signals early enough to act.

Incentive compensation is one of Finance’s most direct operating levers. It’s among the largest expense lines in the commercial budget and the fastest way to change behavior mid-year. A Chief Operator treats the comp plan as part of the operating plan, not an HR document that gets approved once a year.

The Chief Operator idea is directionally right. However, it’s a systems problem before a mindset problem. Finance cannot operate on data it receives too late, nor on a model that Sales and Finance don’t share.

Pipeline coverage against the forecast, watched as a trend rather than a snapshot. Coverage is an early indicator of whether the revenue plan can hold. The key is to pair coverage with evidence of pipeline quality.

Accordingly, Finance should look beyond the headline number and ask the right questions:

• Are opportunities progressing through stages at expected rates?
• Are conversion patterns holding?
• Do activity levels support future pipeline creation?

In that sense, pipeline coverage is less a sales dashboard metric and more a forecasting instrument.

Coverage is only useful if you trust how it’s being created. Stage definitions drift over time. Early-stage opportunities cost nothing to create. And once aware that Finance is watching a specific metric, a Sales organization can unintentionally optimize for the metric rather than the outcome. This aspect is where incentive design matters. If the compensation plan and the financial plan aren’t built on the same model, you end up paying reps to hit a number Finance doesn’t trust. Coverage should be treated as a signal, not a verdict.

The important point is to watch the trend line rather than a single snapshot. Sales forecasts move constantly, so one reading can overstate or understate the underlying risk. Therefore, Finance must interpret how the trend could affect company performance, then work proactively with Sales to understand the inputs:

• Are activity levels changing?
• Is conversion weakening at a particular stage?
• Is the issue isolated to a segment, territory, or cohort?

A healthy total pipeline can still hide a deteriorating conversion pattern. By looking at coverage and stage movement together, Finance can better identify the root cause before the risk appears in quarterly results. Snapshots can mislead by omission. Trends show whether the plan is gaining or losing support.

Don’t start by asking for RevOps’ numbers. Instead, ask for the method. Most Finance leaders open with the forecast, but the forecast is only the output. Here’s a better opening: "Walk me through how you build the sales plan." From the answer, you’ll learn…

• how territories are carved
• how quotas are set and allocated
• how capacity and hiring are modeled
• how the compensation plan is designed to drive the behavior the plan depends on

Then ask what happens when a deal slips, a rep leaves, or a territory underperforms mid-year.

Together, those decisions make up sales performance management and determine whether the forecast is even achievable. Do the quotas add up to the financial target? Do the territories reflect market opportunity? Does the compensation plan reward something other than what Finance is planning for? If the answer is “no” to any of those questions, no amount of forecasting discipline will close the gap.

The purpose isn’t to audit RevOps. Instead, the goal is to understand where the Finance and Sales views already connect, where they diverge, and where each team is making assumptions about the other. That conversation usually reveals key information:

• Whether the teams share a data set
• Whether the teams share a common planning approach
• Whether the teams share enough visibility to resolve differences before they show up in results or in commission payouts

From there, the practical goal is to build one model that links the financial plan to territories, quotas, capacity, incentives, and the forecast. That way Finance and Sales can work the plan together throughout the year instead of reconciling the plan at the beginning or end. Once the gap is visible, alignment stops being a mission statement and becomes a concrete operating project.

In closing, Kaszuba shared what he sees across the organizations he works with:

As I’ve worked with organizations across industries, I’ve seen the same challenge surface repeatedly. Finance and Revenue teams are working toward the same outcomes, but often from different assumptions, different data sets, and different planning models. The companies that navigate growth most effectively create a shared view of the business, connecting financial goals to territories, capacity, pipeline, compensation, and execution.

Best-in-class companies have a unified plan not just with Sales but also with other lines of business, allowing them to be in the room, leading the strategy.

The opportunity in front of Finance isn’t simply to become a better reporter of results. When the plan, the quotas, and the pay all come from the same model, Finance is no longer explaining the numbers after the fact. Finance is instead helping shape them. And that’s the opportunity — to become a more active participant in shaping the numbers.

When Finance and RevOps operate from the same plan and the same data, conversations shift away from reconciliation and toward decision-making. That’s where better forecasts, faster decisions, and more sustainable growth begin.