What We Heard from 500 Hours of Finance Calls: You Don’t Trust Your Own Numbers

I recently dedicated a good few days to something most CEOs claim to do but rarely finish: I listened to the raw tapes.

Our team analyzed hundreds of hours of Gong calls from the last 90 days, combing through conversations with controllers, treasurers, and CFOs at companies ranging from mid-market growth stages to global enterprises.

I expected to hear about interest rates or international expansion. Instead, I heard a consistent drumbeat of frustration regarding the fundamental mechanics of the job.

The 5-Point Summary

Before I get into the specific stories I heard, here is the high-level data on what is keeping finance leaders up at night. Throughout the calls, certain themes appeared with overwhelming frequency:

1. Manual Workflows (~45% of calls): The sheer volume of spreadsheet wrestling required just to "get to zero".
2. Data Visibility (~35% of calls): Not being able to answer "how much cash do we have?" without logging into multiple portals.
3. Reconciliation Bottlenecks (~30% of calls): The struggle to match transactions across fragmented stacks (Banks, Stripe, ERPs).
4. Forecasting Uncertainty (~25% of calls): A lack of confidence in forward-looking data, leading to "caveated" guidance.
5. Pricing Models: Growing dissatisfaction with rigid pricing that doesn't align with value.

These categories represent the ‘what,’ but the conversations on the tapes explain the ‘how.’ To see how these themes translate into daily reality, we’ve broken down the four most recurring challenges we heard.

1. The "Everything is Manual" Trap

It’s not just that manual work is boring. It’s that it destroys data integrity.

One conversation in October perfectly summed up the state of modern treasury. A finance leader, clearly exhausted, told us:

“Everything is manual, so that's the biggest pain point. Everything is manual. It's really difficult to reconcile things.”

When 45% of leaders cite this as their primary obstacle, it’s a structural risk. If your team is spending 90% of their time gathering data manually, they have 0% capacity to actually analyze that data. Treasurers stop being "strategic partners" to the business and instead start functioning as data janitors.

2. The Visibility Paradox

Everyone wants a dashboard. But our calls revealed that, for many, real-time "visibility" is still full of blind spots.

One treasurer told us:

“One of our biggest pain points is just getting a view of our current cash position - what happens in the last week or month and getting a view of that we can then use to forecast.”

Think about that. In an era of instant payments, we have finance leaders who cannot answer the question: "How much cash do we have right now?".

They are operating on data that is days, sometimes weeks, old. If you don’t know where you stand today, you cannot make agile decisions about liquidity.

3. The Fragmentation Nightmare (Reconciliation)

A decade ago, you just had to reconcile your bank account. Today, the stack has exploded.

We heard repeated frustration from controllers trying to stitch together a Frankenstein’s monster of data sources. 

The complexity of reconciling payment gateways (Stripe/PayPal) against bank statements and ERP entries is breaking traditional workflows. This isn't just matching numbers; it's translating different data languages across fragmented systems.

4. The "Confidence Gap" in Forecasting

This was perhaps the most emotional feedback we heard. The recurring theme wasn't just that forecasting is hard; it was that leaders are scared to stand behind their numbers.

Another leader from a major brand told us plainly: “We need more of a forward-looking forecast so I can plan for our liquidity.” Today’s finance leaders are tired of historical reporting masquerading as forecasts.

The Way Out: From "Caveats" to Action

The feedback from these calls confirms a shift we’ve been seeing in the market. The era of the "Passive Treasury" - where you download statements and build reports - is over. It simply doesn't work for the speed of modern business.

Finance teams don't need another dashboard that tells them they have a problem. They need a system that helps them fix the problems.

This is why we talk so much about Agentic Treasury - using AI agents to bridge the gap between static data and active execution - instead of mere reporting.

For example:

• Reporting tells you that you have idle cash sitting in a low-yield operating account.
  
  • An Agent suggests a sweep to a money market fund, checks your liquidity policy to ensure it’s compliant, and queues the transfer for your approval.
• Reporting tells you that your forecast variance is off by 15%.
  
  • An Agent analyzes the variance, identifies the specific AP run that caused it, and updates the rolling forecast automatically.

So what’s our main takeaway from these 500 hours of calls?

It’s this: If you feel like your forecast requires a list of "caveats" before you hit send, you definitely aren't alone. That’s the dominant sentiment in finance right now.

But you shouldn't accept it as normal. The teams winning in this environment are handing the data stitching over to agents so they can get back to what treasury’s supposed to be about: allocating capital.

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