Umair Saleem
ACA · APFA · FMVAIf you run a finance function, you already know the month I am about to describe. The first ten days gone to keying, matching and chasing — done by people who could tell you the rule for every one of those transactions without stopping to look it up.
I have spent over fifteen years in finance. I qualified as a Chartered Accountant, began in Big Four audit and went on to lead finance functions across multiple entities and jurisdictions — the close, the consolidation, the reporting pack, the tax and the external audit.
The part I cared about most was the part nobody finds interesting: the mechanics. What has to be true before a journal is allowed to post. Which supplier always sends a statement instead of an invoice. Which variance is worth chasing and which is noise. That level of detail is where a finance function is either genuinely good or quietly broken.
I have also taken an ERP implementation from process design through to go-live and it taught me the thing this business is built on. A new system does not remove the manual work. It moves it. The keying, the matching and the chasing survive every migration, because nobody ever writes the rules down in a form that software can act on.
So I stopped waiting for somebody else to do it. FinOps Robotics is now what I do, full time. I write the rule set in accounting language, then write the automation that enforces it — no handover to a developer, nothing translated, nothing lost on the way across.
The ambition is simple and quite large: a finance team whose month is spent on judgement instead of on keying. Everything we build is a step toward that.