eBook

What CFOs and Controllers are rethinking in 2026

What finance leaders are actually automating, and why it starts with AR, reconciliation, and payments.

Most finance organizations don’t feel broken.

The systems are live. The reports run. The close eventually gets done.

And yet, many teams feel slower than they should, buried in manual work, chasing payments, and reacting instead of leading.

In a recent Controllers Council conversation, finance leaders described a shared reality: modernization isn’t about adding more tools. It’s about fixing the workflows that sit closest to cash.

Rather than sweeping transformation, CFOs and Controllers are making targeted bets:

• Automating AR before layering on AI.
• Eliminating manual reconciliation to reduce audit risk.
• Prioritizing real-time cash visibility over after-the-fact reporting.

This ebook captures how finance leaders are approaching those decisions today — and how those choices are reshaping the CFO and Controller role as organizations head into 2026.

What You’ll Learn

• Why “nothing’s broken” is no longer good enough
• Where finance leaders are seeing real ROI from automation
• How AR, reconciliation, and payments set the foundation for AI
• What finance teams won’t fully automate and why
• How faster, cleaner data is changing finance leadership