As CFO, you have to realize that decisions have to be thought through. Once you decide, it has to stick, or it will need to stick for a while before you decide to course correct. Especially when it comes to seemingly mundane things like accounting/reporting.
Jim had a perspective...
I was explaining to him that recently I started working to address classification of expenses so our financials can be benchmarked against peers. It involves identifying the right peers, understanding their accounting policies for expense classification, etc. His explained... this might seem a little bit of a mundane exercise, maybe weedy (read: into the weeds), but is a critical exercise. Probably inconsequential right now, but it will start to become important as you grow. In [where he and I worked together], we didn't do a great job of classifying some expenses. While we could explain it every time, that is not a discussion you probably want to have. We didn't fix it, and it became a challenge when the activist investor entered our stock - because they wanted to optimize that line item.
Outside of this though, there are other implications. If you make a decision to treat some item in a particular way, and you decide to change it later, it is likely to attract scrutiny. Why did you misclassify earlier, and what changed that you want to classify now. Was it in error. In public companies, sometimes SEC issues comment letters. (Sidebar: SEC usually reviews 10Ks every 2-3 years once you are over $2B, and more frequently once you are bigger).
As CFO you have to be careful of your decisions - even for the seemingly mundane ones - because as you grow bigger, these can:
1) not only be painful to clean/reverse
2) result in scrutiny and compliance questions
3) have strategic implications
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