What’s the CFO equivalent of a Super Bowl? Leading a business through an IPO or a big merger?

For Dan Crumb, his Super Bowl is the Super Bowl, because he’s CFO of the Kansas City Chiefs, which on Sunday could win a record-breaking third consecutive championship.

Crumb, who’s led the team’s finances since 2010, spoke with CFO Brew about what it’s like to be an NFL CFO, from budgeting and forecasting to what it’s like on game day. (TL;DR: We did not ask about Taylor Swift.)

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Does your financial planning and analysis include a potential Super Bowl win?

We don’t ever budget for playoffs. You just never know what’s going to happen. But what we do is, once we know we’re in, we have a pro forma built already, and we get updated expenses from and revenues from the various departments.

In our business planning, we don’t have it built into the budget. We’re always planning and preparing the same way, whether we win 17 games or we win zero games.

But I would say that for us, winning the Super Bowl [and] being on a good trajectory, we’ve capitalized in a number of ways…with the success of the team on the field. It enables us to attract new corporate partners, or to increase existing corporate partners’ investment in us.

To keep reading about this super CFO, click here.—GD

Outside the Grind is our occasional feature that spotlights the unique passion projects, side hustles, and hobbies of finance professionals outside the office. Let us know if you know, or you are, a CFO or finance pro with an interesting, weird, or unusual side gig.

Like many CPAs, Greg Adams wanted to dispel the idea that accounting is boring. But a couple years into writing an accounting resource guide, Adams—who’s been CFO of the American Management Association, a professional development nonprofit, since 2019—realized that his project wasn’t helping his cause. The guide for accountants, which drew on a career filled with international travel and interesting clients, was at risk of becoming “another boring resource guide,” he told CFO Brew. “I need[ed] to make this exciting.”

So this avid reader of the Jack Reacher series and historical novels ditched the nonfiction to write his own thriller, featuring Dex McCord, the kind of accountant hero he’d always wanted to see in TV shows. Green Shades, a “financial crime thriller,” with accounting education tucked in, was published in 2024.

CFO Brew recently spoke with Adams about writing the novel, how he found time to write it, and what being an author and a CFO have in common.

For more on how Adams created an accountant action hero, click here.—GD

Employee leave requests rose for the third consecutive year, with 57% of organizations reporting that more workers asked for extended time off in 2024, according to a survey released earlier this month by AbsenceSoft.

The pace of the requests is slowing, however. Requests increased by 62% in 2023, after swelling by 96% in 2022. An AbsenceSoft spokesperson speculated that the 2022 jump may have stemmed from the “tail-end of Covid impacts,” while the increase in 2023 may have resulted from the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which went into effect that year and gave more workers the ability to request leave.

Employees’ desire to care for their mental health seems to have been a cause of the jump, according to Seth Turner, co-founder and chief strategy officer of AbsenceSoft. Nearly half (47%) of employees cited mental health as a reason for needing the leave, making it the second most-named justification, the survey found. Turner said that employees are more comfortable discussing their mental health needs than they were even five years ago.

Almost six in 10 (57%) workers cited needing time to recover from an injury or illness as the reason they needed leave, making it the most common driver of requests. The third, cited in 37% of the requests, was caring for an aging parent.

Turner said the combination of employers offering and state laws requiring paid leave is also pushing requests higher.

Click here to keep reading HR Brew’s story on the increase in employee leave requests.—TA

Accounting teams are moving beyond number crunching. Edwine Alphonse of Ramp shares how leaders can boost their team’s strategic capabilities, bridge gaps with FP&A, and drive greater business value. Get her tips for transforming your team’s approach.