Having someone to talk to about high level financial plans and strategies is extremely valuable.

We’re talking growth plans, pricing structure and how to finance it all. Big picture.

Rather than everyday tracking, monitoring and reporting - ie. accounting and bookkeeping.

Generally the strategic high level ideas would come from the CFO or a high level finance advisor. Which is overkill for newer businesses.

But we’re going to use AI to get us started.

Let’s get started:

Layering

We’re going to start by having our new CFO interview us. Just like we did in the last Part about our legal queries. We’ll use the interview technique to help ChatGPT gather up the information it needs from us.

Let’s start with that prompt:

As my business financial strategist interview me about my business to collect information

First ask me what my goal is (provide examples) and wait for my answer
Collect my goal first and use it to know what subsequent questions to ask.
Then gather all the information you require to make recommendations

ChatGPT will go ahead and interview you.

Here’s some recommendations I got (first 2 of 10!) for an example of increasing revenue by 25% from 100k to 125k in a year:

This is already useful. But it’s a little generic. Unlike most users we won’t stop here.

Let’s add some teeth.

Scenario analysis

Let’s get ChatGPT to make this actionable.

Use this prompt below the current work:

Use your analysis to prepare a scenario analysis
Decide on the KPIs for the businesses and present how they interact
Design a table showing potential scenarios

This will get ChatGPT to work out the main drivers of your business and provide KPIs connected to your financial goal. It’ll also prepare some different scenarios for how your plan could go:

as well as detailed outlines of the scenarios:

Sensitivity Analysis

One step further let’s ask for sensitivity analysis so that we can find the points of maximum leverage.

Perform a sensitivity analysis on the variables
List the highest leverage variables

This will lead to ChatGPT adjusting the variables one at a time to find the most impactful:

This is incredibly important information for a growing business and the sort of stuff a good CFO would be working out for us - cutting away the cruft and stripping the business to its bare bones.

Growth plan

We can now pull it all together with a concluding prompt:

This will lead to a month by month financial growth plan for your business that you can actually get to work implementing:

Of course we can ask for each element of these to be detailed into further broken-down steps for us to feed in our project management tool.

What we end up with here is a very detailed financial analysis and breakdown of our business along with a plan for next steps.

Give it a go on your business to see what your AI CFO recommends.