I Asked for a Traffic Light. I Got a Robot.
It started with the FY2026 audit. We were deep in audit preparation, and I needed to see exactly where we stood. Three companies, five people, and a mountain of reconciliations, schedules, balances and supporting documents. Everybody was busy. But busy and finished are not the same thing, as any CFO with an audit date will tell you. So I built a tracker. Nothing fancy. Tasks, owners, deadlines and a place to tick things off. The sort of thing that makes a CFO happy and everybody else slightly nervous. Except my team liked it. Watching the numbers come down The tracker showed each person how many tasks they had left. Finish a reconciliation, tick it off, watch your number drop. And suddenly people were checking their numbers. Voluntarily. Without me asking. I've spent years reminding people about deadlines. Having them chase their own was a new and rather pleasant experience. So naturally, I decided to improve it. That's where things went sideways. The robot misunderst...