Our Framework is the method 📝BrightZen Systems uses to implement a 📝CFO System: 📝instrument the business, gather all of its data in one place, forecast it in an integrated model, and review the metrics that matter every week with the people who move them. 📝John Zdanowski and his partners developed it through 📝Our Experience as CFOs, board members, and fractional CFOs across dozens of companies.
Why Weekly
The framework rests on the 📝Weekly Philosophy: if you're not managing your business weekly, you're managing it weakly. Monthly books arrive too late to steer by. Weekly books give a team 52 feedback loops a year instead of 12, and every week has the same seven days, so weeks compare cleanly. 📝Weekly Accounting is the service that turns this cadence into clean books.
The Six Components
- The 📝Instrumentation Pyramid: a three-level map of business metrics, from the few that forecast the business down to real-time transaction metrics.
- A data warehouse: every system in the company's 📝Systems Diagram feeds one warehouse in 📝BigQuery.
- The 📝Integrated Financial Model (IFM): 📝The Forecas at the center, collecting that data to align day-to-day activity with long-term goals.
- 📝Monday Morning Metrics (MMM): the key metrics, integrated from every system and presented every Monday morning.
- Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly Charts (WMQ): each key metric at three sampling frequencies, so this week's signal can be read against the longer trend.
- 📝The Process: a common language for how information flows through the organization.
How It Runs
The Process turns the components into a feedback loop. Commit to the process, not the outcome. Agree on purpose and build the model. Then do the work, let the data lead through MMM, discuss openly, and empower the team to improve, repeating the loop every week. The loop is applied like a fractal: first at the top of the pyramid, then down through each department. Teach it, elevate your aim, and start over.
Related
- 📝Vital Signs: the minimal set of metrics needed to forecast a business, the top of the pyramid.
- 📝Signal and Noise: why every metric needs more than one view.
- 📝Sampling Frequency: the digital signal processing idea behind the weekly cadence.
I came to this as an 📝electrical engineer. In digital signal processing, you have to sample a signal often enough to see its shape; sample too slowly and you miss everything that matters. A business is no different. The framework is simply how I learned to sample a business fast enough to steer it.