For a long time, the finance function in organisations has been a back-office job — close the books, stay compliant, keep enough cash in the bank to survive the quarter. The job rewarded accuracy over foresight, and a CFO’s standing was measured by how few surprises were brought to the table.
The job description no longer holds today, particularly for SaaS businesses, where a small dip in quarterly retention can snowball into a much larger problem.
The role has grown to include almost everything under its ambit, from market research to product R&D and even deciding pricing of products or services, once exclusive to the CEO’s role.
Simply put: finance leaders are today involved in deciding which market deserves more investment, which product line is worth the losses, and whether a pricing model could open doors to the next big opportunity. In all odds, the CFO today is an organisation’s sounding board.
LeadSquared, a SaaS platform focused on sales execution and marketing automation, is also witnessing this shift under the aegis of its CFO, Chandra Sahal, who joined the company in November 2025 after a 12-year stint at Wipro as its head of finance.
Prior to joining Wipro, Sahal held key finance positions at Infosys, CRISIL, Vee Healthtek and GOAT Brand Labs.
In the 11 months since joining LeadSquared, Sahal has helped the company transition its finance department from a paper pusher (closing books and preparing for audits) to a strategic business partner, where it now has a say in building product roadmaps and driving AI investment decisions.
For Inc42’s latest initiative, The CFO Code, we spoke with Sahal about LeadSquared’s finance function, his take on AI, and how finance leaders can become the CEO’s guiding light towards growth and profitability.
Assuring Real-Time Visibility Into LeadSquared’s Financial Health
Finance teams have long relied on month-end reports to comprehend the financial health of their respective businesses. Sahal has always been obsessed with changing this. At traditional companies, he found it quite difficult to renovate systems that had been embedded for years and brought no benefit.
He saw an opportunity at LeadSquared to build systems and processes agile enough to scrutinise the business on the go. For this, he researched and experimented extensively, eventually zeroing in on using SAP, a leading ERP platform, for core financial records, alongside a CRM to track sales and an in-house system to manage the process from order placement to billing and payment.
On top of these three layers, he built an internal analytics cum audit system that compiles relevant data to give management a real-time view of what’s happening underneath.
“When an invoice is received, it is then looked at by the controller from a revenue recognition perspective and used by the financial team for reporting. All of this happens in real time. We do not wait until month-end to figure out what the revenue is going to look like,” Sahal said.
With this, management gets a view into roughly 30% of the month’s revenue in just week 1, 50% by week 2 and 75% by week 3. Therefore, the final week can be spent checking unusual cases and following up with the sales team, instead of trying to scrap the entire month’s numbers, which could be a process prone to errors. Scrapping numbers at the eleventh hour could also jeopardise the finance team’s productivity and create mockery of everyone’s efforts before the CEO.
“By month-end, our systems give over 95% visibility into what the final numbers are going to be. This near-real-time reporting assists us in closing books much earlier and getting the management information report (MIS) ready by the eighth of the month,” Sahal said.
From Letting AI Do The Grunt Work To Calling The Shots
Speaking about how AI has helped Sahal streamline his operations, he shared that everything that is finance at LeadSquared, including reconciliations, identification of journal-entry gaps, variance analysis and budgeting, now has AI behind the wheel.
This has helped Sahal do a rolling forecast for the full year by the 10th of every month “So, when I enter a board meeting, I have 80-85% visibility into full year numbers,” he said.
So, as someone who keeps an eye on every penny spent in the organisation, how does he analyse the ROI on the company’s AI investments?
Sahal has a simple thesis: the return should show up in the team’s productivity. “Faster deployment, faster code checks, quicker product launches and reducing the time spent collecting and reconciling information is where I feel the real ROI lies,” Sahal said.
At a time when most organisations think it is a good idea to hire specialised AI talent while bloating token costs, Sahal begs to differ. “The more practical approach here is to train existing employees by investing in their upskilling, be it AI or any other technologies. We, at LeadSquared, have the industry’s best token optimisation practices,” said Sahal.
Amid all the AI brouhaha, Sahal does not see AI as a magic bullet but a tool to speed up routine finance work. Tasks that once took days, he said, can now be completed in hours. Similarly, a board presentation that previously took about three days can now be prepared in a few hours.
But the bigger shift, according to Sahal, is the unclogged bandwidth his team uses to interpret numbers, challenge assumptions, and focus on decisions that move the needle.
Over more than a decade in finance, he has seen several tech cycles emerge and perish. But one thing remains: CFOs need to stay ahead of the tech learning curve. A tech-savvy CFO is a guiding force many organisations lack and don’t even know about.
“It is the endeavour of such [tech-savvy] finance leaders that the finance function today has a say at the table,” he said, while illustrating his role as a tech-savvy CFO in the organisation.
And ever since the arrival of AI, tracking token usage, the technology stack and utilisation across teams has also become a diligent part of CFOs’ job role, something nobody would have fathomed would be the case a few years ago, according to Sahal.
Becoming CEO’s Guiding Force To Defend Margins
All said and done, the last 11 months have been anything but a walk in the park for Sahal. He said that when he joined LeadSquared, the company was ailing with challenges that were only patched and never really got solved.
Like any other startup, LeadSquared’s focus was centred around growth at all costs. Somewhere along the way, the balance between growth and profitability went for a toss.
While such a growth strategy can work for a wide array of startups, the problem is that these fads are hardly sustainable.
“Any dollar of new revenue that costs $3 to acquire and churns in a year is not growth. It’s a subscription to losing money,” Sahal said, suggesting the Rule of 40 as a useful gut check for whether a company’s growth rate and profit margin together still make sense.
According to the Rule of 40, a company’s combined annual revenue growth rate and profit margin should equal or exceed 40%
The second major challenge, he noted, sat outside the company’s control. Sahal shared that LeadSquared was once too exposed to geopolitical unpredictability, which often made its decision-making uncertain while investing in a particular market.
“A case in point is our US operations that are averse to rupee volatility. With the INR inching closer to the 100 mark, the onus to defend margins falls on us,” said Sahal.
To combat such uncertainties in regional compliance, Sahal has helped LeadSquared partner with vendors that either operate locally in those regions or are based in India with expertise in specific markets. This helps the company cut compliance and other expenses, offsetting INR depreciation in many cases.
CFO As A Strategic Business Partner
When asked about the mistakes that startups on a hyper-growth path often make, Sahal said that for today’s new-age businesses, an integrated tech stack connecting ERP, CRM, order-to-cash, and an analytics layer is a must.
Without an integrated stack connecting the ERP, CRM, order-to-cash, and analytics layers, a new invoice flow could derail projections and create chaos.
So, does that mean businesses should build a highly stacked finance function from day one? Sahal argued that early stage startups, with a single product and one geography, have the legroom to operate comfortably on Excel and Tally for a couple of years.
“The trigger for upgrading should be complexity, whether that comes from multiple entities, products or geographies,” he added.
Finally, when we asked what the future holds for CFOs, especially in this time and age of AI, Sahal said the role is undergoing a churn and has become too demanding. Finance leaders who can act and play as strategic business partners will define the next phase of finance.
The era of just reporting numbers is over, and finance leaders’ new job is to chart the best course for the CEO.
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