Finance operations
Finance operations is the discipline of budgeting, unit economics and payback tracking that tells a growth team whether its spend is actually working. It covers how a marketing or sales budget is set and approved, how CAC, LTV and payback period are calculated and updated, and how that data reaches the people deciding where to spend next. In many fintech and healthcare companies this work sits half in a spreadsheet and half in a founder's head: a channel keeps its budget because nobody has recalculated its payback since launch, and a monthly close takes two weeks because no one owns the process end to end. Pushers builds finance operations through a two-week audit and a 90-day plan: budget cycles, unit economics models, CAC and LTV tracking and the reporting that connects finance to marketing.
The two-week audit maps your current budget cycle, how CAC, LTV and payback are calculated today, and how far that data actually travels before a spending decision gets made.
An embedded specialist then rebuilds what is missing: a budgeting process with named approvers, a unit economics model that updates on a schedule instead of once a quarter, and a payback tracker tied to the same KPI tree marketing and sales use. Each change is tested in a HADI loop before it replaces the old process.
Reporting runs through one dashboard shared with marketing and sales, so a channel's budget is set from the same numbers finance is tracking, not two separate spreadsheets.
How to calculate channel payback and unit economics
A CAC number that only marketing believes is not a finance number. Here is how to calculate channel payback so both teams work from the same model.
Fractional CFO vs finance operations: which gap do you actually have
A fractional CFO is a person. Finance operations is a system. Most companies searching for one are missing the other, or both.