If CFOs Can’t Answer ‘Where’s Our Money Going?’ They’re Already Behind

CFOs are getting tired of managing for surprises. They want to manage for strategy, instead.

But there is a foundational problem hidden beneath this expanding mandate. Most finance teams still lack continuous, trustworthy visibility into accounts payable, cash flow and the operational signals that shape working capital.

Their systems are fragmented, their data structures inconsistent and many of their processes manual. The result is a financial picture assembled after the fact rather than one monitored as it unfolds. In an era when capital is more expensive, volatility more common, and internal stakeholders more impatient, that delay is increasingly no longer a tolerable inconvenience. It’s becoming a strategic liability.

The simplest test for any chief financial officer is also potentially among the toughest: if someone were to ask, “Where is our money going, and why, right now?” could the finance team answer with certainty?

For many organizations, the honest response may be along the lines of “not exactly.” And that gap reveals a deeper governance challenge that modern CFOs will need to face up to. A fragmented financial environment, after all, not only slows the business. It distorts it, and distortion can be the enemy of strategy.

See also: The CFO’s Real-Time Crystal Ball Turns Liquidity Into Strategy, Not Accounting

The Stakes Have Changed Around the CFO Visibility Deficit

Finance leaders often describe their workflows as an intricate relay race: procurement validates a vendor, operations approves a purchase, accounts payable (AP) enters an invoice, accounting reconciles the spend, FP&A forecasts the impact. To the untrained eye, each handoff appears orderly. But beneath the surface, processes can break down in ways that are both subtle and systemic.

Invoice intake, for example, remains heavily manual for many midmarket and enterprise organizations. Paper invoices still arrive by mail or email. AP clerks re-key data into ERP systems. Exceptions are resolved via email threads or ad hoc policy interpretations. Every touchpoint increases the risk of misclassification, mismatched data, or ambiguous approvals.

PYMNTS Intelligence, in collaboration with FIS research, estimates that operational inefficiencies tied to reconciliation cost institutions roughly $98.5 million annually, largely because manual work remains embedded in billing and data collection workflows.

Most finance teams operate across a patchwork of systems spanning one for AP, another for procurement, another for expenses, another for treasury and another for budgeting. Each system was designed to optimize a slice of the workflow, yet few were designed to work in concert. When data flows inconsistently or requires manual extraction, the organization loses the ability to generate a holistic, real-time view of working capital.

One solution may not simply be the embrace of automation or better reporting, but governance: the disciplined, scalable orchestration of financial data, pricing rules, approval structures and workflow accountability across the organization. Governance is often perceived as bureaucratic, but in modern finance, it can be an engine that enables agility.

Read more: This Time Last Year: How 2025 Reshaped the AP/AR Innovation Cycle

Why Real-Time Finance Starts With AP

Modern CFOs increasingly recognize that AP is not a transactional function but, thanks to technology like AI and automation, is becoming a forecasting function. Automated invoice capture, three-way matching, continuous compliance checks and real-time dashboards convert AP from a reactive workflow into a source of immediate insight. It becomes possible to understand not just what has been spent, but what is committed, what is at risk, and what will impact cash positions in the coming days.

A PYMNTS Intelligence report “Time to Cash™: A New Measure of Business Resilience,” published Oct. 24, introduced a new metric for agility: Time to Cash™.  The report found that 77.9% of CFOs see improving the cash flow cycle as “very or extremely important” to their strategy in the year ahead, and 70% of firms surveyed already use at least one AI tool to manage cash flow.

Ramping up the level of cash flow visibility can be transformative because it compresses the decision window. When finance leaders can see spending commitments before invoices hit the ledger, they can adjust budgets, renegotiate contracts, or shift capital allocation with confidence. In effect, AP becomes the sensor layer for the entire finance operation.

Still, as separate PYMNTS Intelligence highlighted, only 7% of organizations have fully automated AP, while 42% still relied on predominantly manual workflows.

For CFOs, the question is not whether to modernize. It is whether they can afford the cost of opacity.

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