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The 5-slide business case that gets CFO approval.

Not the deck your champion loves. The five slides a CFO will actually read before deciding. Fillable, so you bring your deal and not a blank page. Enter your email and it lands in your inbox.

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Five slides. In this order.

The sequence matters as much as the content. You earn the right to ask for money by first showing what the problem already costs.

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1. The Cost of Inaction

Before you introduce your solution, name the cost of doing nothing. In dollars, tied to something the CFO already tracks. Not "manual reconciliation is slow." Instead: "manual reconciliation costs 340 hours a quarter, roughly $61,000 in fully loaded time."

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2. The Financial Case

Three columns, not one number. Conservative, base, upside. Same inputs, different assumptions, each one labeled as an assumption. Adoption rate, hours saved, fully loaded cost per hour, annual impact. Built on their numbers, not yours.

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3. The Total Investment

Put the full number on the slide yourself, before they have to ask. License fee, implementation, internal team time, ongoing management. Total year-one investment, stated plainly. Hiding a cost is the fastest way to lose the room.

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4. Risk & Governance

Answer the question nobody asks out loud: what happens if this goes wrong? Accountability, with a named sponsor and a review cadence. Reversibility, in the contract terms. Proof, from a reference customer with a comparable risk profile.

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5. The Decision

A specific ask has three parts. Amount, date, problem solved. "We're asking for approval of $X by [date], to solve [problem]." No hedging, no "next steps." A CFO can say yes to that in the room.

The CFO is not evaluating your product.

They are evaluating whether the money is better spent here than somewhere else. That decision needs a baseline, defensible numbers, the full cost, a downside, and a specific ask. Give them those five things in that order and you are having a finance conversation instead of a demo.

About the template

What is in the template?

Five fillable slides, one per section of the case: the cost of inaction, the financial case with conservative, base, and upside columns, the total year-one investment, risk and governance, and the decision slide with the specific ask. Each slide has the prompts and the blanks already laid out, so you fill in your deal rather than design a deck.

Why five slides and not a full business case document?

The long document is for your own rigor. The five slides are what actually gets read in the approval meeting. A CFO decides on the baseline, the numbers and their assumptions, the total cost, the downside, and the ask. Everything else is supporting material you bring only if asked.

Do I need to fill in every blank before the meeting?

Yes, and with numbers you can source. A blank you cannot fill is usually a discovery gap, not a formatting problem. If you cannot state what the problem costs today, you are not ready for the finance conversation yet.

Related resources

Guide

How to Build a CFO-Ready Business Case (Step-by-Step)

Guide

How to Sell to the CFO

Framework

The VISION Framework

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