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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

Basically everything about enterprise is a nightmare for engineers. What amazes me (after having worked at some of the most profitable companies in the world) is just how little intelligence the leadership has about their own revenue or costs, beyond "wow huge amounts of money is coming in or going out". And how many critical processes are implemented manually, by individuals, with personal spreadsheets, on their laptops.

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Yup, I work at a tech company and our entire finance & billing team is using excel exclusively (I think our payroll/leave system is the only thing not on excel), where every other team uses one system or another. All of the higher ups makes decisions based on docs created out of all those excel artifacts. I have to admit, their productivity is quite good and they are kings at aggregating and graphing data in sexy ways. It would be a challenge to build them something that actually works better and can adapt quickly to changes (the software lifecycle too slow for them and now they have to deal with some developer types to get something done, so skip all that noise and stick to excel).

It's a difficult topic to tackle; The financial leader has different needs than the tech one. One needs a perfect report with exact match day over day, month over month, year over year. The second one needs to do the math to calculate instant consumption of the product. If we add marketing leaders of a company to it, it brings creativity to the extreme (like inventing new prices, just to use it "as a hack"). Same goal (revenue), but definitely not the same path to success

> intelligence the leadership has about their own revenue or costs

I see the positionning of the CFO right next or below the CEO as a mechanism to let the CEO care about “big pitcure” money flow, while having someone in contact with reality guide decisions and veto stuff that won’t fly in cost/revenue terms.

I have a SaaS idea I’ve been sleeping in solely because building the billing, authentication, & marketing are each an additional 96% of the work that is not building the actual functionality of what I’d want to sell.

Yep, I'm about ready to start implementing one of those very spreadsheets just to start trying to categorize Azure costs.

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