Your warehouse is full. So why can’t you ship your best seller?
Because your forecast is built in a spreadsheet somebody last updated in January. Finley is the Fortune 500‑caliber AI CFO that knows your company: every plant, every entity, every ledger, every account. It tells you which SKUs are earning their keep, where your cash is sitting, and what you can afford to build next. Today, not three weeks after your controller closes the month. And you will never explain your own business to it twice.
For manufacturers doing $10M to $50M who build to a forecast and ship from stock, run one or two plants, and have a controller instead of a CFO.
Finished goods
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Revenue
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The gap
0 pts
Cash in the gap
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for Manufacturing
Know which SKUs are earning their keep
You add SKUs one at a time, and you almost never take one away. A size that made sense for an account you no longer have. A flavor a customer asked for twice. A private-label variant that ties up a changeover every month. Each one carries a setup, a minimum run, safety stock, and a slot in the warehouse, and each one looks harmless on a line-item report. Finley knows what every SKU actually costs you, to make in the run sizes you really run and to carry at the volumes you really hold, and ranks the tail. The third of your catalog producing almost none of your profit stops being a suspicion and becomes a list.
Your inventory is a decision, not a consequence
Finished goods up twenty-two percent. Revenue up six. That gap is not a reporting artifact. It is cash converting into product the market has not agreed to buy yet, at the rate of the gap. A distributor’s inventory is set by what customers ordered. Yours is set by what you decided to build, months before anyone ordered it, which makes it the one term in your cash cycle you actually control. Finley watches finished goods against revenue, days of supply against real velocity SKU by SKU, and the excess-and-obsolete reserve that otherwise grows quietly until someone finally runs the aging. You find out you are building into a forecast the market is not validating while it is still a production decision, not a markdown.
See the margin you earned, not the margin you absorbed
Build more than you ship and your P&L improves while your bank balance falls, because the overhead you absorbed into inventory left the income statement and moved onto the balance sheet. Run the plant light and gross margin drops even though nothing about your operation got worse: same prices, same crew, same efficiency. Standard costing does this to every manufacturer who builds to stock, which means your best-looking months and your best months are not always the same months. Finley knows the difference: the margin you actually earned, separated from the margin you capitalized into inventory, with purchase price variance tracked as input costs drift away from a standard nobody has revisited since last year. Margin down, price flat, efficiency flat is not an execution problem, and you should not have to spend a week proving that.
Nine entities, two production modes, one answer
The building sits in one LLC. The plant operates in another. There’s a sales entity, probably an equipment entity, and an accountant who consolidates it once a quarter if you ask nicely. Your bank looks at one entity’s balance. The private equity firm that calls twice a year asks for a data room. Nobody holds the whole thing at once except you. And inside the operating company you are probably not one business either. Almost nobody your size runs a single production mode: your top forty SKUs go to forecast while private label runs against a customer’s purchase order, and one blended inventory turns number describes neither of them. Finley holds every entity at once and segments what everyone else averages, reading your real mix out of the data rather than out of how anyone describes it. Those two answers disagree more often than not.
Concentration is the discount your buyer applies first
Manufacturers are far more concentrated than they feel. Twenty to two hundred active accounts, and the top five routinely past forty percent of revenue. At the other end, one grade of resin, one alloy, one sole-source component sets the cost of everything you quote. You already live with this. What you may not know is that a buyer haircuts hard for any customer above twenty-five or thirty percent, which makes concentration the first line item off your enterprise value long before it is an operating problem. Finley breaks revenue and gross profit out by customer, and spend by supplier, so both are numbers you are managing years before anyone runs diligence on them.
Connect Finley once and start gaining insights.
Connected in minutes. No data migration, no implementation project, no new system for anyone on the floor to learn, and nothing for your controller to maintain. Your ERP keeps running production, purchasing, and the plant. Finley reads what it produces and tells you what it means.
Then the part that matters. Finley keeps what it learns. Every month it knows your seasonality better, your customers’ payment habits better, which lines run hot in August and which ones sit, which accounts always pay ten days late and which one just started to. Your controller has been here nineteen years and knows all of it, and all of it lives in her head. The fractional CFO you hired for fourteen months knew some of it, and it walked out with him. The next banker, the next lessor, the next buyer will each start from zero. Finley started once, and never starts over.
Know your cash position today, and any week between now and next year
Finley builds a rolling cash flow forecast and keeps it current: every open bill, every expected collection, your actual payment patterns, and a certainty band that widens the further out it looks. The cash flow forecast is 13 weeks by default, but extends up to one year when a decision needs it. So when you take the volume price break on twelve months of packaging in September, you know before you cut the PO whether the next two quarters can carry it.
Rolling forecast · weekly
Everyone else starts from zero. Your banker included.
Your banker knows your balance. The equipment lessor knows the machine. The private equity firm knows a multiple. Not one of them knows what your plant actually does, and every conversation begins with you explaining it again. Here is what that costs you. Your revolver advances eighty-something percent against receivables and half to two-thirds against raw material and finished goods, and nothing at all against work in process, so a third of your balance sheet is invisible to the facility secured by it. Fixed charge coverage is the covenant most likely to trip, and it trips fastest when you fund good capital equipment out of cash flow. A lender reads that as a breach. Someone who knows your business reads it as a Tuesday. So when you ask how to finance a $600K packaging line, a bank answers with the product it sells. Finley answers with your options: a term loan, a fair market value lease, a $1 buyout lease, the vendor’s own captive paper, or the customer deposit that is the cheapest capital available to you and the one nobody negotiates for. It weighs what each does to your cash flow, profit outlook, balance sheet, and covenant headroom, reasoned over the actual cash you have for the down payment. Then it recommends one. Bankers have long kept your options close to the vest. Finley works for you, because Finley is yours.
One caveat: confirm the month ahead before you commit the down payment.
Find out what the news means for your P&L
When a tariff lands on an input you import, resin or corrugate moves, or the Fed changes the rate on the equipment loan you were about to sign, the headline tells you it happened. It doesn’t tell you what it does to your standard costs, your landed freight, your borrowing rate, or how fast your channel reorders. Ask Finley and you don’t get the general answer. You get yours, because it already knows which inputs you buy, which entity holds the note, and what happens to your margin when corrugate moves four percent.
Watching · your A/P at $964K · floating freight rates
CFO recommendation
Model a 12% cost scenario before the surcharges land. I can stress-test your forecast now.Run the stress test
SKU-level margin analysis
What every SKU actually costs to make at your real run sizes and carry at your real volumes, with the tail ranked: the setups, the safety stock, the slots you’re paying for.
Inventory position and days of supply
Finished goods against revenue. Days of supply SKU by SKU against actual velocity. Turns segmented by production mode instead of blended into a number that describes neither. The excess-and-obsolete reserve, aged before it surprises you.
Standard-to-actual and absorption
The margin you earned, separated from the margin you capitalized into inventory. Purchase price variance as input costs drift from your standard. The cash truth under a heavy build month.
Rolling cash flow forecast
13 weeks by default, extending to a full year when a decision needs it. Every open bill, every expected collection, the raw material and capex you’ve committed to, covenant headroom, and a certainty band.
Every manufacturer deserves to be known.
You have spent thirty years building something strong. Every dollar on your floor should be a dollar you chose to put there, and every decision should start from what your company actually is, not from an explanation you have given a hundred times.