Your first 100 days as CFO: a phased plan and checklist

Your first 100 days as CFO are the period in which a new finance chief moves from diagnosis to the first visible results. It is a short window, closely watched by the CEO and the board, and in practice it sets how much room for manoeuvre you will have for the rest of your tenure. The pressure is not theoretical. According to Russell Reynolds Associates' Global CFO Turnover Index for the first half of 2026, 11% of companies in the world's major stock indices appointed a new finance chief in those six months, up from 10% in the same period of 2025, and retirements accounted for the highest share of CFO departures in eight years. The figure that affects you most is a different one: 64% of those appointments went to people taking the job for the first time, four points more than a year earlier.

If you are reading this, the odds are that you are a first-time CFO.

This guide sets out a roadmap in stages (before day 1, days 1 to 30, days 31 to 60 and days 61 to 100) with concrete deliverables in each, a full checklist and the challenges specific to the UK market. Cash is the thread running through it, because cash is where a newly appointed CFO can show measurable impact in weeks rather than quarters.

What a CFO's first 100 days are, and why they set the tenure

A CFO's first 100 days are the transition phase in which the new finance chief has to meet three objectives at once: understand the business properly, earn credibility with the executive committee, and produce tangible results before proposing any large-scale transformation. Neither passive observation nor a race to change everything will serve here. The work of these weeks is to build the base that everything else rests on.

The three real objectives of the period

Agicap's conversations with six sitting CFOs produced three priorities that came up without exception:

Act as a business partner and create immediate impact

Reviewing a pricing and discount model, for example, and turning it into margin.

Improve the efficiency of the finance function

Achieving more with the same resources, starting with collections and bringing DSO down.

Meet the legal and operational expectations

A clean month-end close and investor reporting delivered on time are the floor, not the ceiling.

Why cash is the first front

The biggest impact you can have as a newly arrived CFO is in cash. There is a practical reason for that: it is the only indicator the whole executive committee understands without translation, and the only one you can improve without changing the structure of the company. One CFO interviewed for the Agicap guide put it plainly after arriving in the middle of an LBO. His first action was to go after the money owed by customers, and within a few weeks he had recovered the equivalent of 4% of revenue.

Read that figure as one specific case rather than a rule. In the UK, structural payment behaviour means the realistic target for your first weeks is a different one: audit and unblock the twenty largest overdue accounts, separate the documentation problems from the genuine disputes, and measure how much cash that work releases. You set the headline figure afterwards, once you have the data.

The wider context reinforces that priority. In its Pulse Survey of finance leaders, PwC found that 58% of CFOs were increasing their focus on core finance capabilities such as cash and liquidity forecasting in the face of a volatile environment, and that 57% placed economic policy among the top three factors reshaping their strategy.

What the CEO and the board expect from you

It might look as though a CFO should concentrate purely on their own function in the first few months, but the research shows that CEOs expect a strategic contribution from day one. The classic mistake is the opposite one. A McKinsey Global Survey of CFOs found that 61% wished they had spent more time with business unit leaders during their first 100 days. Most spend almost all of their early time on financial planning, reporting and accounting, and given the chance again they would halve it.

Before day 1: the preparation almost nobody does

The roadmap starts before you join. Yves Souguenet, CFO of the Hennecke Group, designed his during the recruitment process itself. Sven Faveris, an interim CFO, does the same systematically and aligns it with the CEO before signing.

The documents to ask for before you join

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• The last set of statutory accounts and the monthly management accounts for the previous twelve months.

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• Every banking relationship in full: lenders, terms, charges and the working capital facilities in place (invoice discounting or factoring, supply chain finance, overdrafts and revolving credit facilities, interest rate and FX hedging).

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• The Companies House register of charges for every entity in the group, which is the public record of the security the company has granted. Cross-checking it against internal records is the fastest way to surface debentures, fixed and floating charges or negative pledges that nobody has mentioned. It will not tell you how much is drawn, because the amount secured is not a required particular, so pair it with lender confirmations and a commercial credit report.

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• The debt schedule with maturities and covenants.

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• The aged debtors report with the overdue detail.

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• The current cash flow forecast and its history of variances.

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• The company's standing with HMRC: any Time to Pay arrangement, any outstanding VAT or PAYE liability, any open enquiry or penalty.

Clarify your mandate before you start

If it was not done during the recruitment process, align with the CEO and the board on the urgent priorities and the measures of success. Put your objectives in writing with KPIs, scope and level of authority. This is the conversation that prevents the most expensive misunderstanding of all, which is discovering in month four that something was expected of you that nobody ever wrote down.

Use the moment to announce your arrival as well. An introductory email to the other directors with a short questionnaire on their expectations and their view of the finance team gives you a baseline and sets the tone before day 1.

Days 1 to 30: financial diagnosis and a map of the organisation

The first month is for analysis. As a new arrival you have a fresh perspective with a short shelf life, so document everything you notice. With one exception, which comes before any diagnosis.

First: te tax and filing calendar

In the UK, the compliance calendar governs a CFO's diary in the first few weeks and it does not negotiate. Before you open any analysis, go through the recurring deadlines falling in the next 60 days.

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• VAT. Returns are quarterly by default, and both the return and cleared payment are due one calendar month and seven days after the end of the period. Filing runs through Making Tax Digital software, with digital links between systems rather than manual transfer of data.

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• Payroll taxes. A Full Payment Submission goes to HMRC on or before every payday under Real Time Information, and PAYE and National Insurance are payable by the 22nd of the following tax month when you pay electronically.

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• Corporation tax. Payment falls nine months and one day after the year end, and the CT600 twelve months after it. Large companies, meaning augmented profits above £1.5 million a year divided by the number of associated companies plus one, pay in quarterly instalments on the 14th day of months 7, 10, 13 and 16 of the accounting period. Above £20 million the instalments move earlier, to months 3, 6, 9 and 12.

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• Companies House. Statutory accounts are due nine months after the accounting reference date for a private company, and the confirmation statement at least once every twelve months.

Identify the big annual dates too, depending on when you join: P60s to employees by 31 May, P11D and P11D(b) by 6 July with the Class 1A National Insurance due by 22 July. A missed deadline turns into penalties and interest automatically, and Companies House late filing penalties run from £150 to £1,500 with personal liability for directors on top.

One 2026 item deserves its own line. Identity verification at Companies House became a legal requirement in November 2025, and existing directors have to verify at the same time as they file their next confirmation statement. A confirmation statement filed without verified directors and people with significant control is rejected, so check where every entity in the group sits in that transition before it becomes a filing problem.

On the same day, review the payroll block. Payroll, PAYE and National Insurance, pension auto-enrolment contributions and, once the annual pay bill passes £3 million, the Apprenticeship Levy at 0.5% are the largest and most predictable monthly cash outflow in a UK mid-market company, and they all ride the same monthly cycle.

Check what the company would have to declare if it bids for public work as well.

Under the Procurement Act 2023, a supplier's position on tax offences and tax misconduct forms part of the exclusion-grounds information filed on the central digital platform and confirmed in the Procurement Specific Questionnaire, which is the successor to the Standard Selection Questionnaire. The declaration reaches group companies, directors and subcontractors, so a tax penalty anywhere in the structure becomes your problem.

An X-ray of the cash position

Start with the basics and quantify them: how many bank accounts exist, how many banks you work with, how many legal entities make up the business, and how long it takes today to produce a consolidated cash position. In mid-sized companies with a multi-entity structure, that last figure is usually measured in days rather than minutes.

Then ask what currencies that position is in. A UK group selling into Europe and buying from the United States typically holds sterling, euros and dollars, and the moment you consolidate you are making an FX decision whether you notice it or not. Settle two things in week one: which rate the consolidated position is translated at, spot or budget rate, and who owns that choice. Spot makes the consolidated figure move with the market, which is honest but noisy and makes month-on-month comparison harder. A budget rate keeps the comparison clean and pushes the difference into an exchange variance you then have to explain. Neither is wrong, but an undocumented mix of the two is, and it is common. While you are in there, establish what the group's actual FX exposure is and whether any of it is hedged, because an unhedged receivables book in a currency you do not report in is a cash risk that no cash position statement will show you.

Damien Duquesne, CFO of the Comet Software Group, made it his number one priority: daily visibility of consolidated cash, weekly tracking of balances and cash forecasts. In his own words, he made it clear from day one that having consolidated cash visibility was not negotiable.

Who can move money, and who can change where it goes

This is the check that gets skipped, and it carries the largest single-day downside of anything in this list. A CFO handover is the moment a finance function is least certain who is in charge, which is precisely why fraudsters watch for one.

Start with the bank mandate, the document telling each bank who may operate each account. Get the current mandate for every entity and every bank, the dormant accounts and the foreign-currency ones included, and reconcile it against the organisation chart and the delegated authority matrix. You are looking for leavers who are still authorised signatories or still hold portal access, dual authorisation thresholds that do not match the approval limits the board believes are in place, single-signature accounts nobody remembers opening, and your predecessor, who in all likelihood is still on the mandate. Changing signatories means a change of mandate, and the form has to be signed in accordance with the existing one, so this gets harder the longer the leavers have been gone.

Then look at the other end of the payment. Mandate fraud, also called payment diversion fraud, works by changing a genuine supplier's bank details, usually through a compromised or spoofed email thread. The control is procedural rather than technical. Whoever can amend a supplier's bank details must not be the person who approves the payment, every change has to be verified by calling a known contact on a number already held on file rather than one that arrived in the email, and the change must leave an audit trail. Confirmation of Payee helps, since it checks the account name on domestic Faster Payments, CHAPS and Bacs transfers, but it returns a close match as well as a match, it does not cover international payments, and it will not catch an account opened in a convincingly similar name.

One thing to know before assuming someone else absorbs the loss. The Payment Systems Regulator's reimbursement requirement for authorised push payment fraud covers individuals, micro-enterprises and charities, up to £85,000 a claim. A company with ten or more employees sits outside it, and the cap would be immaterial against a normal payment run in any case. UK Finance put business losses to this kind of fraud at £75.6 million in 2025. There is no safety net here, so the controls are the safety net.

An audit of the existing forecast

Ask for the forecasts from the last six months and compare them with the actuals. The question that matters is not whether a forecast exists, but what its margin of error is and who knows about it. That number is the first figure you should be able to improve.

Working capital health

Calculate DSO, DPO and DIO, and benchmark them against the sector. When you calculate DSO, make sure both inputs are on the same VAT basis, because this is where the number most often goes wrong. Turnover in the profit and loss statement is net of VAT. Trade receivables in the aged debtors report include it. Divide one straight into the other and you inflate DSO by roughly the VAT rate, which at 20% turns a real 60 days into a reported 72. Fix it either way round: gross the turnover up to include VAT, or strip the VAT out of the receivables balance before you divide. Pick one convention, write it down, and make sure whoever produces the report next month uses the same one. DSO is the metric you can move fastest and the one that shows up in cash soonest, so it is worth understanding the operational levers for reducing it before you announce any targets.

Put the three together and you have the cash conversion cycle: inventory days plus receivables days less payables days, which is how long the business waits between paying a supplier and being paid by its customer. Keep that distinct from working capital itself, which is a money amount on the balance sheet rather than a number of days. Conflating the two is how a board ends up arguing about a ratio nobody in the room can define.

Where there is stock, be honest about how fast that part actually moves. Receivables are cash you are already owed, which is why collections can produce a result inside 60 days. Inventory is a different animal. Writing down slow-moving stock improves the inventory days in your pack and releases no cash whatsoever. Clearing excess stock at a discount hands part of the benefit to the customer and lands the rest a full DSO period later. And you cannot stop buying what is already on the water. What you can do in the first 60 days is stop it growing: freeze purchase orders on overstocked lines, fix the forecast inputs feeding replenishment, and size the slow-moving and obsolete tail so at least the scale of the problem is known. Structural inventory reduction runs through purchasing, production planning and supplier lead times, so treat it as a programme across several quarters rather than a quick win, and say so before somebody on the executive committee writes the number into a forecast.

This is also where mid-market companies have lost the most ground. PwC's working capital study puts inventory days up 24.2%, or 15 days, at medium-sized companies over the past decade, against 5.5% at large firms, and UK net working capital days up 48% since 2015, the sharpest deterioration in the study.

In parallel, review every overdue receivable and separate the ones in genuine dispute from the ones nobody has simply chased.

Find your next covenant test date

Ask for the facility agreements and go straight to the financial covenants. In a UK mid-market facility that usually means leverage (net debt to EBITDA), interest cover and, where there is amortising debt, a debt service cover ratio, tested quarterly on a rolling twelve-month basis and reported to the lender in a compliance certificate signed by a director alongside the management accounts.

Three questions, in this order. When is the next test date? What is the forecast headroom on each ratio at that date? And how are the terms actually defined, because the definition of EBITDA and its permitted add-backs, the treatment of leases and shareholder loans in net debt, and any equity cure rights decide compliance at least as much as trading performance does. A CFO who finds a covenant problem when the compliance certificate falls due has already lost the time that would have been worth the most.

While the facility agreements are open, work out the split between fixed and floating rate debt, because that ratio is how much of the profit and loss account is exposed to the next Bank of England decision. Sterling commercial debt is now priced over compounded SONIA in arrears plus a margin, usually with a five business day lookback, and only legacy facilities transitioned from LIBOR carry a credit adjustment spread on top.

Express the exposure in the form a board can act on: what a 100 basis point rise costs in annual interest, and what it does to the interest cover headroom you have just calculated. There is no market-wide benchmark for how much to hedge, and treating a fixed to floating ratio as a target in its own right is a mistake, so the real question is how much of a move the business can absorb before a covenant is at risk.

Check as well whether the facility already obliges you to hedge, because lenders often write a minimum hedging requirement into the agreement, the intercreditor agreement or a separate hedging strategy letter.

A breach is neither the end of the world nor nothing. Most are handled by a waiver, often for a fee, or by a covenant reset negotiated as part of an amendment, typically in exchange for a higher margin, tighter reporting or additional security. What a lender reacts badly to is finding out late. That is the whole reason to do this in month one: an anticipated breach is a negotiation, and an unanticipated one is an event of default with cross-default clauses attached to it.

A map of stakeholders

Set up one-to-one meetings with all of your direct reports in the first two weeks, as BCG recommends in its analysis of the CFO's first 90 days. Widen the circle afterwards to the heads of sales, marketing, procurement, product and HR. The aim of each conversation is to find out what keeps them awake and to solve at least one problem for each of them. Finance is the most cross-functional function in the company, so there is always a way to add value.

Add the external parties: banks, auditors, advisers and board members. Pay attention to their feedback on the business and on your predecessor.

An assessment of the team and the technology stack

Map every process: what software is used, who is involved and to what end. Sit in on some meetings as an observer without intervening, and ask yourself why things are done that way. Is it habit? Are tools missing? Are people missing? Unless something is urgent, change nothing on day one.

The effort is worth it because the headroom is large. A CFO is still estimated to spend half their time on low-value work, and more than half of the automatable tasks in finance functions remain un-automated.

Day 30 deliverable

A one-page diagnostic report covering the current consolidated cash position, the average forecast error, DSO and recoverable overdues, three process inefficiencies identified and three undeclared risks.

Days 31 to 60: quick wins and the first decisions

The second stage is about credibility. You have the data now, and what you need is results.

Close the visibility gap

Start with simple reporting that shows the consolidated daily cash position. It is the quickest way to create a common language with the executive committee, so that they understand the cash available, how many days of liquidity it covers and how much undrawn headroom is left on facilities, before you ask them to prioritise anything.

Put a 13-week forecast in place

Once you have a consolidated figure, the next step is anticipation. The 13-week cash flow forecast is the standard horizon for a newly appointed CFO because it covers a full quarter, is short enough to be reliable and long enough to see liquidity pressure coming. PwC estimates that AI agents can deliver up to a 40% improvement in forecasting accuracy and speed, which turns the choice of tool from a technical question into an item on the CFO's own agenda.

The quick wins that build credibility

Set yourself a concrete, communicable target: resolve 50% of the issues blocking those twenty accounts before day 60.

One warning about sales incentives. Linking variable pay to cash collected rather than to invoices raised is the right lever in the medium term, but it is not a quick win. In the UK, a commission scheme written into the contract of employment cannot be changed unilaterally. You need the employee's agreement, or an express variation clause in the plan that actually covers what you want to do, and imposing the change exposes the company to claims for breach of contract, unlawful deduction from wages and constructive dismissal. Dismissal and re-engagement is the fallback, and that route is narrowing.

The Statutory Code of Practice on Dismissal and Re-engagement has been in force since July 2024, and a tribunal can increase an award by up to 25% where an employer has unreasonably failed to follow it. Section 28 of the Employment Rights Act 2025, which received Royal Assent in December 2025, will make dismissal for refusing a restricted variation to contractual terms automatically unfair in most cases.

That section is not in force yet: the government's implementation roadmap and Acas both point to January 2027, the roadmap states that all future dates remain subject to parliamentary process, and the consultation that will define which variations count closed in April 2026 without a response so far. Treat it as coming rather than settled, and assume the fallback is on its way out.

What you can do in the first few weeks is agree the change with HR and employment counsel for the next commission cycle, and in the meantime put sales in the room at the credit control meeting.

Concentrate the cash before you optimise the yield

There is a step between seeing the cash and earning something on it, and in a multi-entity group it is worth more than the yield. If every entity holds its own buffer, the group is borrowing on one account while earning nothing on another. That is the textbook definition of a cash silo, and it is expensive in both directions at once.

The standard UK answer is physical pooling, which banks sell as cash concentration or simply as sweeping. Participating accounts are swept to a header account on an automated cycle, either to nil, which makes them zero balance accounts, or to a stated target balance, which cuts the number of transfers and the charges attached to them. For a group whose entities bank in sterling with one bank, this is an ordinary product rather than a large-corporate one.

Notional pooling is the other route, offsetting balances for interest purposes without moving any money. It is still offered in the UK, but be realistic about the terms. Because the leverage ratio rules do not let a bank net loans against deposits, a notional pool consumes the bank's own balance sheet, so it is selectively offered and priced accordingly, and the multi-currency and cross-border versions are largely a big-corporate product.

Before signing anything, four checks, and two of them usually get skipped.

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• The cross-guarantees. Any pool where the bank grants offset comes with guarantees and letters of set-off between the participating entities. Read who has guaranteed what, and whether the set-off right is enforceable in insolvency rather than only in the ordinary course of business.

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• Corporate benefit. Each participating company's directors owe their duty to that company rather than to the group. A subsidiary lending its cash upstream needs a documented rationale and a board minute. Where an entity is loss-making, or has minority shareholders or a pension scheme, this stops being a formality, because on the Supreme Court's decision in BTI v Sequana the duty to consider creditors engages once the directors know, or ought to know, that the company is insolvent or bordering on it.

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• The balance sheet presentation. This is the one that catches people. Netting the balances in the accounts requires both a legally enforceable right of set-off and an intention to settle net, and a notional pool whose participants carry on spending their balances on their own obligations usually fails the second limb. Fail it and gross cash and gross debt both stay on the balance sheet, which can move a leverage covenant even though the economics are net. Ask the auditor before you sign, and run the covenant calculation both ways.

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• The intercompany interest. The rate charged between the header and the participants has to be defensible, and the benefit has to be shared so that every participant is better off inside the arrangement than outside it. Small and medium-sized enterprises currently sit outside the UK transfer pricing rules, but the boundary is measured on consolidated group figures and has been under consultation, so a group anywhere near it should get the documentation in place before it needs it.

If you have inherited a pool rather than built one, the same four checks apply, plus one more: reconcile the schedule of participating accounts against the current list of legal entities. Companies that were sold, dissolved or acquired and never added are the commonest defect, and in an inherited zero balance structure entity-level cash visibility has often been gone for years.

Stop surplus cash sitting idle

Once the consolidated position and the 13-week forecast tell you how much cash the business genuinely does not need for the next quarter, look at where that money is sitting. In plenty of mid-market groups the answer is a current account paying nothing, which at current base rates is a visible cost rather than a theoretical one.

The audit is quick. List every account and the rate it actually pays, not the rate on the tariff. Establish the minimum operating balance each entity needs and how much notice you would need to bring money back. Then match the maturity of any placement to the forecast rather than to the rate on offer, because cash you have to break a term deposit to reach was never really available. The instruments a UK treasury team works with are instant access business savings, notice accounts at 32, 95 or 180 days, fixed-term deposits, sterling short-term money market funds and, for larger balances, Treasury bills.

Two constraints belong in the conversation before anyone gets enthusiastic. The first is counterparty concentration, and it is worth being exact about how little the compensation scheme does for you here. FSCS deposit protection applies to company deposits with no size test, so a large company is eligible, but it is capped at £120,000 per eligible depositor per banking licence, a limit that rose from £85,000 on 1 December 2025. Per licence, not per brand: a number of apparently separate banks share a single licence, so splitting a balance between two brands of the same group buys you nothing. At corporate scale that cap is a rounding error, which means bank counterparty risk is a matter of a concentration policy and of watching credit ratings, not of the compensation scheme.

The second is that a money market fund is a holding in a collective investment scheme rather than a deposit, so the deposit regime does not reach it at all. There is a separate FSCS investment limit of £85,000, it carries a small-company test under section 382 of the Companies Act 2006 that most mid-market groups will fail, and it never covers a fall in value in any case. None of that makes money market funds unsuitable. It means the protection question simply has a different answer than it does for a deposit, which is exactly the sort of thing that belongs in a written treasury policy approved by the board rather than in the finance team's judgement in the moment.

Tidy up the banking relationships

One analysis is simple and pays for itself: compare the percentage of bank charges you pay each lender with the percentage of flows you run through them. The gap between those two figures is your negotiating position.

Extend the review to the working capital instruments, which is where much of the real cost of finance sits: invoice discounting and factoring, whether recourse or non-recourse, confidential invoice discounting, supply chain finance on the payables side, the limits and utilisation on overdrafts and revolving credit facilities, and interest rate and FX hedging. Cross-checking all of that against the Companies House charges register and your lender confirmations gives you the full map of what is secured and what is drawn before you sit down to negotiate.

Read the small print on the last twelve months of bank charges as well. Unauthorised overdraft interest, returned direct debits and unarranged borrowing charges tend to hide thousands of pounds of automatic and unwarranted cost that can be reclaimed or renegotiated straight away. Bear in mind too that a facility renewal or increase takes longer than the credit decision suggests. Credit committee approval, facility documentation and the registration of any new charge at Companies House, which has to be delivered within 21 days of creation or the charge is void against a liquidator or administrator, can easily put three to six weeks between approval and money you can actually draw. Plan it into the calendar.

Day 60 deliverable

A concise dashboard shared with the executive committee and the finance team, carrying the cash, working capital and efficiency KPIs, their monthly targets and the initiatives attached to each gap.

Days 61 to 100: the finance roadmap and the 12-month plan

The last stage turns one-off results into a sustainable plan.

From diagnosis to the annual cash plan

With the consolidated position and the 13-week forecast running, you can build the twelve-month cash flow plan and the scenarios around it. This is the document that moves you from answering questions to asking them.

Define the dashboard you will report every month

A balanced scorecard works better than a list of loose indicators. To make it useful, explain how each indicator is calculated, set realistic monthly targets, and spell out the initiatives needed to close the gap between where the number is and where it needs to be. That makes it clear that the responsibility is shared.

When spreadsheets stop being enough

The signal is recognisable: the data is scattered across several systems, spreadsheets and manual tasks, and consolidating the cash position of every entity eats days of work every month. This is the point at which many CFOs turn to Agicap to automate cash, collections and payments control, and to work from a single source of data for control, analysis and reporting. At Comet Software, Damien Duquesne prioritised the treasury tool ahead of the ERP and went from receiving financial statements in April of the following year to giving the CFO of each entity monthly visibility of revenue, cash and EBITDA.

Present the roadmap to the board

Put your results alongside a short self-assessment: what you have achieved, where you have fallen short and why. Then explain the next steps, the resources you need and the changes required. If you have involved the stakeholders since day 30, there will be no surprises.

Day 100 deliverable

A twelve-month finance plan presented and approved, a dashboard in operation, and a transformation roadmap with resources assigned.

The CFO's first 100 days checklist

Before day 1

1. Study the accounts, the sector and the competition

2. Ask for the full picture of banking relationships and working capital facilities, and pull the Companies House charges register for every entity

3. Clarify the mandate and put KPIs, scope and authority in writing

4. Send the introductory email with a questionnaire on expectations

5. Find an external mentor, a former CFO from a comparable company

6. Sort out the personal logistics so you do not lose energy in the first month

Days 1 to 30

1. Review the tax and filing calendar and every deadline falling in the next 60 days

2. Check the company's standing with HMRC, including any Time to Pay arrangement or open enquiry

3. Confirm where each entity stands on Companies House identity verification before the next confirmation statement

4. Audit the payroll cycle, the RTI submissions and the PAYE and National Insurance payment dates

5. Reconcile the bank mandate for every entity and every bank against the organisation chart, and remove the leavers

6. Check that supplier bank detail changes are verified by call-back and segregated from payment approval

7. Identify the next covenant test date and the forecast headroom on each ratio

8. Establish the split between fixed and floating rate debt and what 100 basis points costs

9. One-to-ones with every direct report in the first two weeks

10. One-to-ones with each member of the executive committee

11. Visit the sites, operations and customer service

12. Use the product and talk to customers

13. Map the processes, tools and responsibilities

14. Calculate the consolidated cash position and how long it takes to produce

15. Audit the historical error in the cash flow forecast

16. Cross-check the Companies House charges register against internal records of debt and guarantees

17. Review every overdue receivable and isolate the 20 largest

18. Size the slow-moving and obsolete stock, and separate what is sellable from what needs writing down

19. Check whether the company is paying suppliers within the statutory terms

20. Audit the historical cost of unauthorised overdraft interest, returned direct debits and facility legal fees

21. Identify hidden risks: litigation, fraud, uncontrolled spend, compliance

22. Review the insurance strategy and its cost

23. Block out 30 minutes a day for strategic thinking

24. Publish the first consolidated daily cash report

Days 31 to 60

1. Define the main strategic priority and validate it in one-to-ones

2. Launch two or three pilot projects with measurable impact

3. Put the 13-week cash flow forecast in place

4. Plan facility renewals or increases six to eight weeks ahead, allowing for credit committee, documentation and charge registration

5. Resolve 50% of the issues blocking the 20 largest overdue accounts

6. Set up the weekly credit control meeting with sales and finance

7. Renegotiate charges and review invoice finance, supply chain finance and credit facilities

8. Test whether sweeping or pooling is worth building, and on any pool you inherited check the cross-guarantees, the corporate benefit minutes and the balance sheet presentation

9. Audit where surplus cash sits, what it earns and what notice it is under

10. Challenge every planned investment with the person who owns it

11. Open the review of collection-linked commission with HR for the next cycle

12. Make the difficult team decisions before the day job takes over

13. Build and share the dashboard

Days 61 to 100

1. Show the executive committee concrete results from the pilots

2. Build the twelve-month cash flow plan with scenarios

3. Decide on the finance stack and plan the implementation

4. Present the roadmap and the self-assessment to the board

5. Delegate, and move from a sprint to a marathon

If you want the full detail of this roadmap, with the action tables for each phase and the six interviews with sitting CFOs behind it, you can download the guide:

The challenges specific to a CFO in the UK market

Multi-entity structures and cash consolidation

Plenty of UK mid-market companies operate through several legal entities, often with different charts of accounts and different banks, particularly where the group has grown by acquisition. Consolidating the cash position by hand is the most common bottleneck and the one that holds up every treasury decision. Fixing it early frees up time in all the stages that follow.

Visibility is only the first half of the problem, though. Once you can see the balances, the question becomes whether they are working, which is what cash concentration and pooling exist to answer. A group banking with six lenders usually finds that the structure it would need is considerably harder to build than the reporting was, because a pool works best inside one bank and the entities are spread across all six.

Late payment, statutory terms and e-invoicing

The Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, as amended in 2013, sets the framework, and it pays to be precise about what that framework does and does not do. Where no payment date has been agreed, statutory interest starts running 30 days after the customer receives the invoice or the goods and services are supplied, whichever is later.

Between businesses there is no absolute cap today: a 90-day or 120-day term is valid and enforceable. What section 4 of the Act does is move the date from which statutory interest and compensation start to accrue, so where an agreed term runs past 60 days and is grossly unfair to the supplier, interest begins on day 61 regardless of what the contract says. The public sector position is the hard one. A public authority purchaser gets no fairness escape from the 30-day point, and section 68 of the Procurement Act 2023 implies a 30-day payment term into public contracts, allows earlier payment and renders without effect any term that tries to override it.

Statutory interest runs at 8% above the Bank of England base rate, simple rather than compound. The rate is fixed by reference to the base rate in force on the preceding 30 June or 31 December, so for a debt falling overdue between 1 July and 31 December 2026 it is 11.75%, and a base rate decision in the meantime does not change it. On top of that sits fixed compensation of £40, £70 or £100 depending on the size of the debt.

The scale of the problem is documented. DBT research puts the cost of late payment to the UK economy at almost £11 billion a year, with roughly £26 billion owed at any given moment, 28% of UK businesses affected, and around 14,000 business closures a year attributed to it. Businesses that chase report an average of 86 hours a year spent doing it.

Three things a new CFO should have on the desk in the first month:

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• The payment practices reporting duty. Companies and LLPs that exceeded the medium-sized thresholds on their last two balance sheet dates, meaning turnover of £54 million, a balance sheet total of £27 million or 250 employees, have to report twice a financial year, within 30 days of each period end, on the GOV.UK service. The report covers average payment days, the percentage of invoices paid in under 30 days, 31 to 60 days and 61 days or more, the percentage paid outside agreed terms, and, for financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2025, the value of payments in each band and the share of late payments attributable to disputes. It is published and searchable, which means your payment behaviour is a matter of public record.

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• The legislation coming. The Commercial Payments Bill, introduced in the Lords in May 2026 and promoted as the Small Business Protections Bill, would turn that soft position into a real cap: maximum terms of 60 days for private purchasers and 30 days for public authorities with strictly limited exemptions, mandatory statutory interest at 8% above base, a right to a fixed sum where a purchaser raises a dispute late, and investigation, adjudication and penalty powers for the Small Business Commissioner. It was still at report stage in the Lords in September 2026 and has not received Royal Assent, so none of it is in force, and the government has said it will allow a lead-in time before the powers bite. Plan against 60 days, and watch the Bill.

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• Public contracts. For central government contracts with an expected value above £5 million a year including VAT, advertised on or after 1 October 2025, PPN 018 tests your own payment performance as a condition of participation at the selection stage under section 22 of the Procurement Act 2023. You have to show that you paid at least 95% of invoices within 60 days, or at least 90% alongside a published action plan signed off by a director, and that you paid all invoices within an average of 45 days, in at least one of the two previous six-month reporting periods. Failing the test means deselection. It is a procurement policy condition rather than one of the exclusion grounds, and the distinction is worth knowing, because the test runs on data you have already published and cannot restate.

On e-invoicing, nothing is mandatory yet. The joint HMRC and DBT consultation closed in May 2025, and the outcome published that November confirmed that e-invoicing will become compulsory for all VAT invoices from 2029, built on the Peppol network, with a detailed implementation roadmap expected at Budget 2026. The practical point for the first 100 days is to find out whether the company could exchange structured invoices today if it had to, because the payment practices report already asks whether it offers e-invoicing at all.

For a new CFO, all of this has three readings. The aged debtors report is a source of recoverable cash in the short term. Collections policy is one of the few levers you can pull without depending on anyone else. And it is worth checking early whether the company pays its own suppliers within the statutory terms, because that behaviour is now reported, published and priced into public tenders.

Working capital instruments in the UK market

UK cash management rests on a set of products worth mapping in the first month: invoice finance on the receivables side, asset-based lending, supply chain finance on the payables side, overdrafts and committed revolving credit facilities, and interest rate and FX hedging.

The distinction that matters most on the receivables side, and the one most often blurred, is between factoring and invoice discounting. Under factoring the funder takes over the sales ledger and chases your customers directly, and the arrangement is disclosed to them. Under invoice discounting you keep the ledger and the credit control, and under confidential invoice discounting your customers are never told a funder is involved at all. That is not a pricing difference, it is a question of who owns the customer conversation, which makes it bear directly on the credit control meeting you have just set up: handing collections to a factor and running a weekly internal collections meeting are two different answers to the same problem. Cutting across both is whether the facility is recourse or non-recourse, meaning whether the bad debt risk stays with you or sits with the funder.

Each instrument carries a cost, consumes risk appetite and has a different effect on DSO and DPO, and plenty of them are still in place out of inertia. The invoice finance and asset-based lending market advances over £20 billion at any one time in the UK, so the terms are negotiable and the benchmarks exist. Reviewing these instruments alongside the charges register is usually the first source of finance savings a newly arrived CFO finds.

Banking fragmentation

A UK mid-market group that has grown organically and by acquisition tends to end up with several banking relationships, each with its own portal, file formats and terms. Mapping that group of lenders and automating the bank connections is usually a new CFO's first infrastructure project.

Seasonality and liquidity pressure

In sectors with pronounced seasonality, a 13-week forecast is not enough on its own. You will need scenarios that anticipate the peaks in working capital requirement, and a conversation with your banks before the peak arrives rather than during it.

The five most common mistakes in the first 100 days

1. Acting before diagnosing. Changing everything on day one burns credibility and political capital.

2. Promising savings without consolidated data. Any figure you announce becomes the yardstick you are measured against.

3. Staying inside finance. This is the mistake most CFOs recognise after the fact. Your first team is the executive committee.

4. Rebuilding the reporting before fixing the underlying data. Michael Zehender, CFO of Framos, prioritised data quality and basic reporting before launching anything broader, precisely so as not to overload the organisation.

5. Ignoring working capital to concentrate on the income statement. A profit and loss statement does not pay the payroll.

What happens after the first 100 days

Once day 100 is past, the focus shifts from control to anticipation. With cash under control and the reporting working, the CFO can turn to what PwC identifies as the finance agenda: strategic capital allocation, transformation of the finance function, the integration of artificial intelligence and management of regulatory risk. It is also the moment to close out what would not fit into 100 days, starting with the review of variable pay in sales so that it rewards cash collected rather than invoices raised, this time with HR and employment counsel inside the process from the start.

It is also the moment to change pace. The first 100 days demand intensity, and sustaining that indefinitely is not realistic. Set reasonable deadlines, delegate and get ready for the long run.

Take control of cash from your first quarter

If the CFOs who come out of their first 100 days well have one thing in common, it is that they secured cash visibility nobody argued with, and they secured it early. Agicap brings the cash position of all your entities, your forecasts and your collections and payments into a single platform, so you can spend your time deciding rather than consolidating.

Frequently asked questions about a CFO's first 100 days

How long do a CFO's first 100 days really last?

About fourteen working weeks, but the useful period starts before you join. The CFOs with the most successful transitions prepare their roadmap during the recruitment process and align it with the CEO before day 1.

What should a CFO do in their first week?

One-to-ones with the direct reports, a review of the cash position and the aged debtors report, and a conversation with the CEO to confirm priorities and the measures of success. No structural changes.

What is the difference between a 90-day plan and a 100-day plan?

It is the same logic with a different cut-off. The 90-day frame lines up with the natural reporting quarter, while 100 days adds room to present results and the roadmap to the board. What matters is not the number but having defined deliverables in each stage.

Which KPIs should a new CFO present to the board?

At a minimum:

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  Consolidated cash position.

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  The 13-week forecast with its variance.

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  DSO.

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  DPO and inventory days with the resulting cash conversion cycle.

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  The movement in overdues.

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  Working capital.

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  The current ratio.

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  Undrawn headroom on facilities.

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  Covenant headroom on each ratio with its next test date and EBIT margin.

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  A short dashboard with explained monthly targets beats a long battery of indicators with no target attached.

 

When should a new CFO change treasury tools?

When consolidating the cash position across entities requires recurring manual work, when the forecast cannot be refreshed as often as the business demands, or when the data lives scattered across the ERP, the bank portals and several spreadsheets. In multi-entity companies that signal usually shows up inside the first 100 days.