Edit the Report Before You Sign It

By David Figueroa

I want to talk about the file a CFO is asked to sign, not about the tool that drafted it.

A forecast arrives looking finished. There is a funnel. There is a pie chart. A short note says the period went well. The numbers look as if they are there. They do not correlate. The person whose name is on the report did not write the note.

The path is usually the same. Someone pastes a prompt. The model returns a tidy story. The file moves up. Nobody edits it between the paste and the name on the cover. I see this more often now. Leaders are being given what they want to see, and more of it is cycled through an AI before it reaches them. The tone says the team did a good job. If the person on the cover did not write that sentence, they usually did not read the output. There was no editing. They delegated authorship to a machine.

For the person signing, this is a revenue problem, not a matter of style. The file is a claim about the business. Whoever writes it is on the hook for every figure and every conclusion. If a machine writes it and nobody edits it, the claim still goes upstairs. Responsibility for it does not. The person asked to sign it is then deciding on figures nobody has stood behind.

This is how a forecast can look healthy while the systems underneath it disagree. Sales holds one version of the truth. Finance holds another. Delivery holds a third. A polished summary, assembled by a model, smooths those gaps. It does not expose them. The page reads as if someone checked. A sure tone is not a check. I do not treat confidence as evidence.

Look at what the unedited file is made of.

The charts come from whatever was pasted in. Nothing in that step checks them against the systems of record. A number can look right in a pie chart and still fail to reconcile to sales, to finance, or to delivery. If you accept the figure because it appears in the chart, you have skipped the only test that matters.

The conclusions often belong to no one. A generated report will praise performance that no human assessed. It will sound certain because a certain tone is easy to produce. If you did not write the sentence, you cannot defend it when someone in the board meeting asks where it came from. "The model wrote it" is not a source. It is an admission that authorship never happened.

The clean layout pretends the work was checked. A funnel and a pie chart can feel like analysis. They are layout. The format can be perfect on a claim that is wrong.

I am not asking a finance team to stop using a fast first draft. A draft is useful because it is fast. It is not an author. You are the person who knows the function. You can see when the pipeline shape is wrong, when a margin is not believable, and when one figure smells off. A machine does not supply that judgment. That judgment is what lets you defend the report once your name is on it.

The habits are plain. They are the control.

Read each line before you let the file go. If you would not say the line to the board, take it out. Do this with the compliments, not only with the tables. The model's tone is not your assessment.

Trace the numbers back to the source system. Do not accept a figure because a chart repeats it. When sales, finance, and delivery do not agree, the summary is not allowed to choose a winner by sounding sure. Put the disagreement on the page. A signed pack that hides a break between those systems is a claim the business cannot support.

Remove any claim you did not make. Praise, certainty, and trend language should come from your assessment, or they should come out. Keep your name on the document only if you authored it. That choice is the control. Handing it off feels quick until you are asked to stand behind a sentence you never read.

I am not worried that a machine can draft a report. I am worried that leaders stop authoring the numbers they act on. For a CFO, acting on a number and signing it are the same moment. You should be the author of what you sign.

I came to state it this plainly after a conversation with John Holcomb, on The Revenue Integrity Gap, in the episode "The Loop Under Leadership." What I took from that conversation is the point above. The unread draft keeps moving because it looks done.

If the pack on your desk was cycled through a machine, edit it before you sign it. If you cannot trace the numbers to the systems of record, do not sign it. A finished look is not a finished claim.

David Figueroa is president of PRIME-TIME Systems.