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You have worked hard to get where you are.

The qualifications. The years of experience. The financial modelling, the board reporting, the treasury management, the audit cycles, the investor relations, the strategic planning. The ability to look at a complex set of numbers and understand immediately what they are saying about the health of a business.

You are good at what you do. Your peers respect you. Your board relies on you.

And yet there is a question I would like you to sit with for a moment — honestly, privately, without the professional armour that CFOs quite reasonably wear in public.

When was the last time you felt genuinely confident — not just competent, but confident — in how your business manages credit risk?

Not the treasury function. Not the audit. Not the financial reporting.

The specific, practical discipline of credit management. Who you extend credit to and on what basis. How your credit policy is written and whether it is actually being followed. How your sales team’s decisions are creating risk that your balance sheet is carrying. How your debtor book is being monitored and what the early warning signs look like before an account hardens into a default. Whether the bad debt appearing in your write-offs every year is truly unavoidable — or whether a significant proportion of it is the predictable consequence of a process gap that nobody has formally addressed.

If the honest answer is that you are less confident here than you are in other areas of your remit — you are not alone.

And it is not your fault.

The Gap Nobody Talks About

Here is something I have observed consistently across a career spent working with finance leaders at every level of seniority.

Credit management is the discipline that falls between the gaps of almost every professional finance education. It is not meaningfully covered in most accounting qualifications. It does not feature in the majority of MBA programmes. It is absent from most CFO development curricula. It is treated, where it is treated at all, as a specialist function — something for the credit team to worry about, not a strategic competency that belongs at board level.

I once presented on credit management to a room full of final-year finance students at a university. Not one of them had encountered it as a formal subject. The dean of the faculty was in the room and acknowledged openly that it had never featured in the curriculum.

These were the future finance professionals of their generation. Heading into careers where credit management would be one of the most consequential disciplines they would encounter in practice — and they were leaving university without a single lecture on it.

That gap does not close when those students become finance managers, controllers, or CFOs. It persists. It is carried into every role, every business, every board. And the consequences play out in write-offs, cashflow pressure, overdue debtors, and the quiet financial erosion that most businesses experience without ever fully understanding why.

If you are a CFO who has never had formal credit management training — you are in the overwhelming majority. The system failed to equip you with this. That is the system’s failure, not yours.

What CFOs Are Typically Dealing With.

I work with senior finance leaders regularly. The situations vary — different industries, different geographies, different scales of business. But certain themes recur with enough consistency that they deserve to be named.

The receivables ledger that nobody fully owns.

In many businesses the debtor book sits in a strange organisational no-man’s-land. Finance produces the reports. The sales team maintains the customer relationships. Credit — where a formal function exists — manages the collections process. But nobody has clear, senior-level ownership of the strategic question: is this portfolio of credit risk appropriate for this business, and is it being managed in a way that genuinely protects our financial position?

The CFO often knows, intuitively, that the answer is no. But without a clear framework or a confident internal expert, the question remains unasked at the level where it would produce change.

The sales culture that overrides credit decisions.

This is perhaps the most common and most costly dynamic in sales-led businesses. The credit policy exists. The credit limits are set. And then a salesperson with a deal to close and a quarter-end approaching goes around the process — with or without explicit approval — and opens an account that the policy would have flagged.

The CFO sees the consequence when the account goes overdue. But by then the relationship is established, the revenue is booked, and unwinding the situation is more complicated than preventing it would have been. The conversation that needed to happen before the account was opened didn’t happen — because nobody had the authority, the framework, or the confidence to have it at the right moment.

The write-offs that are accepted as normal.

Every business that has been operating for more than a few years has a number. The percentage of revenue that gets written off annually. The figure that appears in the budget, year after year, as an expected cost of doing business.

Most CFOs carry a quiet discomfort about that number. A sense that it is higher than it should be, and that the business has simply learned to live with it rather than to address it. But without a clear diagnostic framework for understanding where the bad debt is coming from and what would need to change to reduce it, the discomfort remains unresolved.

The cashflow pressure that revenue growth doesn’t relieve.

A business whose revenue is growing but whose cashflow is not improving has a credit management problem — whether or not it has been framed that way. The gap between invoicing and collection is widening. The debtor book is growing faster than the cash conversion rate. The working capital requirement is climbing. And the CFO is managing the symptoms — the bank facilities, the short-term funding — without a clear view of the structural cause.

What Support Actually Looks Like

I want to be specific about what CMS offers to CFOs — because I think the word “support” can be vague in a way that is not useful.

This is not consultancy that produces a report and disappears. It is not a software solution that automates processes without changing culture. It is not a collections agency that recovers debt reactively and sends an invoice.

It is a senior credit management resource — with decades of real-world experience across sectors and geographies — that works alongside the CFO and the finance function to address credit risk at the level where it actually needs to be addressed.

In practice that means several things.

A credit management audit. An honest, external assessment of where your business’s credit risk actually sits. Not a compliance exercise. A practical diagnostic — looking at the debtor book, the credit policy, the sales and credit interface, the collections process, and the write-off history — and identifying specifically where the gaps are and what they are costing.

Credit policy design and implementation. Building or rebuilding the framework that governs how your business extends credit — who gets it, on what terms, what the limits are, and what happens when those limits are approached or breached. A policy that works in practice, not just on paper. One that the sales team understands and operates within, rather than one that exists to be overridden under pressure.

Sales and credit alignment. The single conversation that most businesses need and most avoid. Working with the CFO and the commercial leadership to build a shared understanding of what a good account looks like — and an incentive structure that reflects that understanding across both functions.

Ongoing advisory support. Not a project with a defined end date, but an ongoing relationship — the senior credit management perspective that is available when decisions need to be made, when situations escalate, when the board asks questions that the internal team is not fully equipped to answer.

Education and team development. Building credit management capability inside the finance function — so that the dependency on external support reduces over time and the discipline becomes genuinely embedded.

This is what a CFO who lacks confidence in their credit management function needs. Not a vendor. Not a report. A trusted, experienced partner who has been in these situations before and knows how to move them.

You Do Not Have to Have All the Answers

There is a particular pressure that comes with seniority in finance. The expectation — from the board, from the business, sometimes from yourself — that you should know. That your title implies mastery of the full spectrum of financial risk and financial discipline.

That expectation is unrealistic, and it is worth naming clearly.

No single finance professional, however talented and however experienced, can be equally expert in every dimension of financial management. Treasury, tax, reporting, audit, risk, investor relations, strategic planning — and now, increasingly, credit management as a board-level concern. The breadth of the modern CFO remit is extraordinary.

Knowing where to find expert support is not a weakness. It is exactly the kind of strategic thinking that makes a CFO genuinely valuable to a business.

The CFOs who manage credit risk most effectively are not always the ones who understand it most technically. They are the ones who have recognised that it matters, ensured that the right expertise is in place — whether internally or externally — and created the conditions for that expertise to have genuine influence on commercial decisions.

That recognition — that this is important, that we need to do it properly, that the current approach is not good enough — is the hardest step. Everything else follows from it.

The Invitation

If you are a CFO who has read this and recognised something of your own situation in it — the quiet discomfort about the receivables position, the sense that the credit function could be performing better, the awareness of a structural gap that has never quite been addressed — I would welcome a conversation.

No agenda. No pitch. Just an honest discussion about where your business stands and whether there is something useful I can offer.

You have spent your career building financial expertise. You are not expected to have been trained in everything. Credit management is a discipline that the system consistently failed to teach the finance profession — and the consequences of that failure are playing out in businesses every day.

CMS is here to address that gap. Not to replace what you do — but to complete it.

You are not alone in this. And it is never too late to get it right.

If this has prompted a conversation you have been putting off, I would welcome hearing from you directly. The first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. It is simply the beginning of understanding what is possible.