For many finance teams autumn always arrives with the same cookie cutter approach: close Q3, start the annual planning cycle, brace for whatever the wider economy throws at you next, repeat. In this article we take a look at the 5 often overlooked must do’s for CFOs this autumn which fall outside the standard seasonal activities, but which are essential for success.
None of these five things will show up on a typical “CFO autumn checklist,” because none of them are about the year-end close or impact the next years planning cycle directly. They’re about the conditions that determine how well you handle both: whether your team’s knowledge is resilient, whether your own skills keep pace, whether a shift in the market reaches your forecast in minutes rather than weeks, whether your systems can move at the speed the business now needs, and whether the story you tell with those numbers actually changes what the room decides to do. Get those right this autumn, and whatever the wider economy does next becomes a data point to respond to, not an event to survive.
Stress-test your team’s skills gap, not your headcount
Nearly four in five CFOs now expect hiring levels to fall further this year. The instinctive response is a hiring freeze and a tighter org chart. The more useful exercise is asking a different question: if two specific people in your finance function left tomorrow, what would actually break?
Most finance teams have a handful of people who quietly hold the institutional knowledge, you know the ones who know why the consolidation model has that odd adjustment, or how the intercompany eliminations actually reconcile. A hiring freeze doesn’t remove that risk; it just means you can no longer hire your way out of it. This autumn is the moment to map that dependency properly: who holds unique knowledge, what’s documented versus tribal, and where a training budget of a few thousand pounds would remove a single point of failure that a recruitment budget never will. It’s less visible than a headcount plan, but it’s the one that actually protects you when the freeze bites hardest.
2. Invest in your own capability, not just your team’s
There’s an uncomfortable truth in a “do more with less” environment: the CFO’s own skills become the bottleneck faster than anyone else’s. If capex and hiring are both being pulled back, the pressure to personally translate ambiguity into a credible forecast, and to do it with fewer analysts underneath you, lands squarely on you.
That means autumn is the right time to be deliberate about your own development, not your team’s. Concretely: spend real time (not a webinar, an afternoon) getting hands-on by understanding the latest AI technology or automation tools rather than delegating that entirely and staying one level removed. Build or refresh a peer network outside your own organisation with other CFOs that are navigating the same energy price volatility, the same geopolitical noise, the same pressure to do more with less, because right now that peer perspective is worth more than another internal steering committee. And spend time with functions you don’t naturally gravitate to: operations, commercial, IT security. The CFOs who struggle in a downturn are rarely the ones whose technical finance is weak. They’re the ones who’ve been too insulated from the rest of the business to know where the next shock is coming from.
3. Discover how to forecast with speed
Most finance teams don’t have a forecasting accuracy problem so much as a forecasting speed problem. The moment an assumption change, such as a supplier raising prices, a key customer delaying an order, or energy costs spikes, the honest answer is usually “give us a few days to rebuild the model.” By the time that revised forecast lands, conditions have often moved again. Speed and accuracy get treated as a trade-off, as if you can only have a fast forecast or a trustworthy one, but that’s a symptom of how the forecast is built, not a law of forecasting. A model spread across disconnected spreadsheets and manually refreshed data will always be slow to update, however carefully it was built in the first place.
This is precisely the problem a proper planning platform is built to remove, and it’s a large part of why Jedox has repeatedly been recognised as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Financial Planning Software. Because Jedox connects directly to the systems where the underlying data actually lives, such as ERP, CRM, HR, banking feeds, a changed assumption doesn’t mean re-keying numbers into a workbook; it flows through automatically. Driver-based models mean that when one input moves, every dependent line recalculates with it, instantly, across the P&L, cash flow, and balance sheet together, rather than one cell someone remembers to update. And because scenarios can be built and compared live rather than rebuilt from scratch each time, a CFO can put “what if costs rise 8%” or “what if this customer delays 60 days” in front of the board within the same meeting, not the following week. That’s the real value of a modern planning platform: not a forecast that’s precise once a quarter, but one that stays trustworthy while conditions keep changing.
4. Start your finance transformation – the status quo isn’t a safe option
Sticking with the status quo feels safe because it’s familiar, but familiar isn’t the same as low-risk. Every month spent rekeying data between disconnected spreadsheets, reconciling three versions of the same “single source of truth,” or rebuilding a forecast model from scratch is a month where the finance function is slower and more exposed than it needs to be and that exposure gets more expensive, not less, the moment market conditions force a same-week reforecast. Doing nothing isn’t neutral. It’s a decision to carry that risk into the next year.
The good news is that getting started doesn’t have to mean a disruptive, big-bang overhaul. The businesses that transform successfully tend to start narrow: pick the one process causing the most pain right now, often budgeting, consolidation, or management reporting and fix that first, on a platform that can then scale to the rest of the finance function once it’s proven itself. It’s the same Gartner-recognised platform already mentioned above: Jedox is built to support exactly this kind of incremental transformation, letting finance teams model scenarios, automate consolidation, and move off spreadsheets at a pace they control, rather than forcing an all-or-nothing platform switch. If you’re weighing up where to start, an honest audit of where data still moves by hand is a far better use of autumn than waiting for the pressure to force the decision for you.
5. Learn to tell the story behind the numbers
In a climate where every line of spend is being scrutinised, the reports that get acted on aren’t necessarily the most accurate ones – they’re the ones that get understood. A perfectly reconciled variance analysis that reads like a data dump gets skimmed, nodded at, and quietly deprioritised. A CFO who can explain in one sentence why the number moved, and what it means for the decision in front of the room, gets the investment case approved, the hiring exception granted, the transformation project funded. That’s not spin. It’s the difference between numbers that inform and numbers that persuade, and in a “do more with less” environment it’s the second one that actually moves things forward.
This is a skill, not a talent you either have or don’t, and autumn is a good time to deliberately practise it. Start by flipping the structure of your next board pack: lead with the “so what,” not the data, and push supporting detail into an appendix rather than the opening slide. Pick one number per section that actually matters and be able to explain its cause and consequence to someone outside finance in a sentence they could repeat back accurately. And when you’re pitching the transformation case from earlier in this list, remember that the platform capability is only half the argument — the other half is whether you can make a non-finance board member feel the cost of staying with the status quo, not just see it in a table. The CFOs who get funded aren’t always the ones with the best numbers. They’re the ones whose numbers land.
About Kybos
Kybos is a dedicated UK & Ireland Jedox Platinum partner. We build planning and analysis solutions that deliver value fast using accountancy qualified consultants. Whether you want a fully customised application or to build upon an existing solution, Kybos consultants are here to help.