Channel firms need a real CFO long before the buyer turns up

Shilpa Kaluti does not have a finance degree. She is a software engineer by education who became, in her own description, an accidental CFO, and she now runs the money at a consultancy she says is aiming to grow from a 40 million company to a 100 million one within a couple of years, no currency given. In an interview with Raconteur published on 24 September, the co-founder and chief financial officer of Scrumconnect set out what she thinks the role is for. “A CFO should be a catalyst for change,” she told Raconteur.

Kaluti told Raconteur that the modern CFO is part strategist, part operator and part translator, and that the job is to be the reality check on the chief executive’s vision, not simply to report the numbers. AI, on her account, is a digital assistant for the parts of finance that used to be done by hand. Her best piece of business advice, she said, was to start early, because someone else will act on an idea you sit on.

Scrumconnect is not a vendor. It is a UK public-sector digital consultancy that has become a Workday services partner, the kind of services firm most of this publication’s readers run: growth depends on delivery, people and the terms struck with the platforms it implements.

The argument is simple. The UK channel is full of businesses between £5m and £50m of revenue that have a finance function built for the company they were three years ago. They have a financial controller, an outsourced accountant and a founder who reads the bank balance. What they do not have is the person Kaluti describes, and they tend to hire that person about two years late, usually when a buyer or a private equity firm is already asking questions.

What the filings say

The public record shows the shape of Scrumconnect’s growth. Companies House lists Scrumconnect Limited as incorporated on 10 October 2011, with Kaluti an officer of the company from that first day. It filed small-company accounts for the year to March 2024 and, on 29 December 2025, medium-company accounts for the year to March 2025. Under the Companies Act 2006, a medium-sized company meets two of three tests. For the year to March 2025 those were turnover of no more than £36m, a balance sheet of no more than £18m and no more than 250 employees (the limits rose to £54m and £27m for years beginning on or after 6 April 2025). The filing gives no number, but it shows a business that had outgrown the small-company regime.

The firm’s Workday partnership announcement on its own website says Scrumconnect supports 16 of the former Central Digital and Data Office’s top 75 government services and is building a Workday center of excellence in Newcastle, with an initial focus on local government, academia and the National Health Service. Those are the company’s own claims, but they describe a familiar channel model: implementation, application management and training around another firm’s platform.

Kaluti meant ideas, but it holds for finance too. A finance function cannot be retrofitted in the quarter before a sale process. The habits that make a services business sellable – clean revenue recognition, monthly management accounts that close on time, a view of gross margin by client and by practice, honest utilization numbers – take a year or more to become real, because the first six months of any new reporting are spent finding out which numbers were wrong.

What buyers actually test

The buyer’s advisers start with the ledger, and they price what they find. A partner that cannot show deferred revenue cleanly, that books vendor rebates wherever they land, or that has three customers making up half its revenue with no plan for it, does not fail diligence. It gets a lower multiple, a bigger earn-out and a longer argument over completion accounts, which is worse.

That is the difference between a bookkeeper and the CFO Kaluti describes. A bookkeeper records the year the business had. A CFO shapes the year it is about to have, and can explain it to a stranger with a spreadsheet and a deadline. In a sale, the finance lead translates between the founder’s story and the buyer’s model; if nobody inside the business can do that, the buyer’s advisers will, on their terms.

Platform partnerships of the kind Scrumconnect has signed also change the shape of the profit and loss account. Application management is recurring and margin-rich if it is staffed and priced properly, and a drag if it is not. Deciding which is which is a finance judgment, and it needs someone senior enough to say no to a contract the sales team wants.

Build it two years out

Three things follow for a UK channel leader.

First, decide who owns the number. If the answer is the founder plus an external accountant, the gap grows with every new service line. Hire or promote a finance lead with the authority to change how the business operates, not only how it reports, at least 18 to 24 months before any buyer or investor conversation.

Second, use the tools Kaluti is describing for what they are good at. AI and modern finance systems can take the manual work out of the month-end close, reconciliation and cash forecasting, which frees a small team to spend its time on margin and pricing – the strategic work Kaluti is talking about.

Third, run your own diligence before somebody else does. Ask what a buyer would find in the revenue recognition, the rebate accounting, the customer concentration and the contracts, and fix it while it is still your problem rather than a price adjustment.

Kaluti calls the CFO a catalyst for change. In the channel, the more common role is a witness to it. The firms that get the price they think they deserve are the ones that made the switch before anyone was watching.