How the CFO of Insightsoftware, a platform for CFOs, thinks about his job

When a company’s customers are CFOs, it puts that company’s own CFO in an especially interesting place. That's the position Josh Schauer, CFO of Insightsoftware, finds himself in. The company provides solutions for ERP reporting, accounting, and financial data analysis, the bread and butter of a CFO’s day-to-day work.

CFO Brew caught up with Schauer to see what happens when the buyer and the seller both have “CFO” on their business card.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What’s it like being the CFO of a business whose clients are other CFOs?

It’s unique, in a very good way. Being a CFO or an executive at a company where you’re a voice of the market is a very unique opportunity. Internally…the marketing team will run things past me. How does this resonate with you? Pass this along to your team. Do you think this is catchy? Do you think this is practical from a product perspective and development perspective? Thinking through features and functionality on the roadmap…is this realistic? Do you think this is going to improve our win rate? It gives you an opportunity to get a lot more go-to-market experience and background than you would if we were at Company X selling widgets that didn’t apply to CFOs.

Does it change the way you talk to your investors about financials?

In some ways, when you’re reporting your financials, you’re reporting your financials. But in other ways, I think you get to have the perspective from a go-to-market lens that’s very different. It’s going to change the way that you’re messaging and the tone with which you’re messaging. When we present to our investors, I think it’d be very traditional to get through the financial update, and then the CFO takes a back seat.

That’s very different in our business, because we’ll get through the financial update, then we get into the strategy component. CFOs, their roles evolved, and they’re very much strategic thought partners…It’s just very different from how it used to be, that’s probably even enhanced more at Insightsoftware, given the fact that I’ve got the financial acumen and background of our specific business. I also have the voice of the customer with respect to what we’re trying to sell.

How do you see your role as a CFO in this time of uncertainty?

It is uncertain, and it’s going to continue to be uncertain in 2026…I do think in what I’ll call the modern era, the post-Covid era, it’s more of the same. Because you had Covid, you had interest rates, you had inflation, you had the Great Resignation, you had FX volatility. You’ve got all these things that CFOs have been managing for the last five or six years. And next year, it’s going to be more of that. And so ultimately, what it means from a CFO perspective is needing to continue to do the things that you’ve had to develop over the course of the last five or six years. Which is being very proactive, very thoughtful scenario analysis, trying to see around the corners, thinking through your cash and liquidity several years out, and not managing it day to day, week to week, or month to month. So it’s just more of needing to be very thoughtful with regards to what could take place. What you’re going to do in each of those different scenarios, and how you’re going to handle that and make sure it’s in the best interest of the business.

Any advice for CFOs on doing that?

​​Understand your business. Every CFO likes to think they understand their business, but there’s a lot to understand. To really, really intimately understand your business, you want to understand your cost composition from the bottom up. What are your vendors? How many employees do you have?…From a top-down perspective, how many customers do we have? What’s our addressable market? What’s our right to win? What are our moats? What’s our win rate? How are we going to drive more pipeline? How are we going to win a higher percentage?

You really want to understand your business, because you need to understand what levers and dials you have. Because in order to be agile, you need to be able to think about, in certain scenarios, what am I going to toggle up? What am I going to toggle down? What are we going to pull back on? What are we going to lean into? How are we going to go faster? And you really can’t make those decisions in an agile manner without really, really intimately understanding your business.

If you weren’t a CFO, what would you be?

A physical therapist.