Finance: Your CFO Agent – Sapience Cloud

Overview

Most finance answers you can find online are written for a company that isn't yours. They assume a stage, a jurisdiction, a revenue model and a fiscal calendar — and then give you a confident answer that quietly depends on all four. Nothing in the answer tells you which assumption was wrong.

The CFO Agent is built to not do that. It works like a finance leader who establishes your situation before concluding anything, and it fills two very different seats:

If you don't have a CFO, it is one. Cash and runway, the plan and the forecast, your unit economics, the raise, the board pack, the close. It teaches as it goes — it names the term, then defines it in a clause — because it assumes no prior finance training.

If you *are* the CFO, it's your chief of staff. The VP Finance who takes the variance bridge, the model, the lender letter and the board deck off your desk.

Its defining behaviour is that it works as the front door to a team. When a question belongs to a specialist — tax, deal modelling, diligence, legal, contracts — it routes the work to the Sapience agent built for that, then comes back to you with one answer rather than a pile of handoffs.

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💡 Who has this agent: The CFO Agent is an installable agent — it doesn't appear in your agent list until you add it. Install it with one click from the Sapience AI Store, where it sits in the Finance + M&A category.

The Facts It Establishes Before It Answers

The agent deliberately refuses to answer a finance question in the abstract, because the same question has different right answers depending on facts you may not have mentioned. Before substantive analysis it establishes:

Fact	Why it changes the answer
Stage and size	Seed-stage runway advice and public-company capital allocation are different disciplines
Jurisdiction(s)	Tax, statutory reporting and company law all fork here
Entity type	Drives what's even available to you structurally
Fiscal calendar	"Before year-end" means a different date for everyone
Revenue model	Subscription, usage and one-off revenue have different economics and different accounting
Runway	Changes whether a question is strategic or urgent
Founder mode or CFO mode	Sets the depth, the vocabulary and the deliverable

It then shows you a short Facts Block — what it has established, what it has assumed (and what would change if the assumption is wrong), and what it still needs. If something in there is wrong, correct it and the analysis changes with it.

This is also why the agent remembers. Your company context persists between conversations, so it doesn't re-interview you every time you come back.

What It Can Help With

The agent covers the whole finance function, not one slice of it:

Area	Examples
Planning & analysis	Budgets, rolling forecasts, driver-based models, variance bridges, scenario and downside planning
Unit economics	Burn multiple, net revenue retention, CAC payback, LTV/CAC, magic number, Rule of 40
Cash	Runway, gross vs net burn, 13-week cash flow forecasting, treasury
Funding	Debt and equity raises, capital structure, cap tables and dilution, venture debt, bridges
Debt & covenants	Covenant headroom, testing, what to do when a breach is coming
The board	Board packs, investor reporting, the specific decision you're asking the board to make
Close & controls	Month-end close, audit readiness, internal controls
The seat itself	Operating cadence, finance-org design, systems, a first-100-days plan

It Reaches For Specialists — On Purpose

The CFO Agent's most distinctive habit is knowing what not to do itself. Its instructions carry a table it consults before answering, and when a question lands in a specialist's territory it hands the work over and synthesises the result into its reply.

When your question involves	It reaches for
Building any financial model — LBO, DCF, three-statement, scenario, sensitivity, cap-table waterfall	Deal & Corporate Finance Analyst
Valuation, comps, precedent transactions, accretion/dilution, deal returns	Deal & Corporate Finance Analyst
US federal or state tax, elections, R&D credits, sales-tax nexus	US Tax & Accounting Agent
Australian tax, GST, Div 7A, ATO positions	Australian Tax & Accounting Agent
Diligence red flags, quality-of-earnings interrogation, data-room review	Advanced Due Diligence Agent
Comparables sets, market multiples applied to a valuation, screens, trend reads	Yahoo Finance Analyst
Heavy data transformation, SQL, large datasets, dashboards	Data Analyst Agent
Legal research — statute, case law, regulatory interpretation	Legal Research Assistant
Reviewing an actual contract, MSA, SPA, lease or credit agreement	Contract Review Agent
Multi-source web sweeps, market sizing, competitor and benchmark hunts	Web Research Agent

The *Deal & Corporate Finance Analyst* is the one it reaches for most — it's the only specialist named twice in that table, once for building models and once for valuation work.

You don't need to arrange any of this. Ask your question in plain terms and the routing happens underneath; what comes back is one CFO-grade answer, not a transcript of who was consulted.

Figures That Change Every Year

A large part of finance is numbers that reset — contribution caps, interest rates, venture-debt terms, benchmark multiples, regulatory thresholds and their effective dates.

The agent treats every figure baked into its own knowledge as a dated anchor, not current truth. Anything that resets annually or moves with the capital cycle gets verified at the moment you ask, or is delegated to a research specialist — and it states the as-of date on any figure it asserts.

If you see a number without a date attached, that's worth questioning. A confidently stated stale number is worse than an admitted gap, and the agent is built to treat it that way.

When To Use It

Use the CFO Agent when:

You need the finance answer and the reasoning behind it, in language you can take to a board or an investor.

The question spans several areas at once — a raise that has tax, modelling and legal edges to it.

You want the whole finance function in one place rather than picking the right specialist yourself.

Go straight to a specialist when:

You already know the work is purely a model build or a valuation — the Deal & Corporate Finance Analyst is the direct route.

You have a pure tax question for a specific country — the US or Australian Tax & Accounting Agents answer at practitioner depth.

How You Use It

Install it from the Sapience AI Store, in the Finance + M&A category.

Tell it where you are — roughly your stage or revenue, what you sell, where you're incorporated, and how much runway you have. One or two sentences is enough.

Ask the real question. Not a tidied-up version: the messy one, with the numbers you actually have.

Check the Facts Block it gives back. Correct anything wrong before you act on the analysis.

Ask it to produce the artefact — the board pack section, the variance bridge, the lender letter, the model — rather than stopping at the explanation.

We have $2.1m in the bank, burning about $260k a month, and we want to
start a Series A process in roughly six months. What should I be doing now?

Good To Know

It's a reasoning-heavy agent. It runs on Claude Opus 5 at high reasoning effort, so it will often think for a while before its first words. Longer waits on hard questions are expected, not a fault.

It remembers your company between conversations. That's what stops the discovery gate becoming a chore.

It won't hand you internal machinery. You'll see that it consulted specialists; you won't get a dump of what each one said.

It is not advice. The agent provides financial analysis, planning and management support — not investment, tax or legal advice. For decisions that need a licensed professional, it will say so and point you at the right one.

Summary

The CFO Agent is a complete finance function: an expert CFO for a company that doesn't have one, and a chief of staff for the CFO who does. It establishes your actual situation before it answers, dates every figure that can go stale, and routes specialist work to the Sapience agent built for it — returning one answer rather than a set of handoffs. Install it from the AI Store under Finance + M&A.