For your team · The CFO Chair
Corporate Finance / CFO Operations
Sit in the CFO chair of a real company — covenants, audits, M&A inbound, board questions — day after day, on books that keep score.
The CFO Chair adapts the continuous-operations model to corporate finance, on a real company's books. Every active day, the inbox surfaces 1-5 finance emails: a treasurer flagging a covenant test, the audit committee chair asking pointed questions, a tax position needing a call, a board member proposing a buyback, an M&A inbound. Most are multiple-choice; the rest ask for a written memo (100-300 words) that a senior-CFO LLM grades 0-10 on financial reasoning, judgment, and stakeholder awareness, with the company's books in view. Every call moves those books with its timing: cash, each debt line at its own rate, revenue and costs, the covenant the lender tests every fifth sim day, and capital projects whose results are drawn once per class and reported on a post-audit card a few weeks later. Cash can't go below zero: a shortfall draws the revolver at a penalty rate, and a call the company can't pay for is refused. Each sim week the team also commits a range for Friday's cash (the public company also guides next quarter's EBITDA), and the sim checks it. The CFO Score weights four pillars 4/15, 4/15, 4/15 and 1/5: Cash Discipline (liquidity against the company's floor and covenant headroom, every day), Capital Allocation (value created at the cost of capital), Audit Trust (the judgment calls and memos) and Forecast Accuracy (the weekly guidance). Five companies, each starting from its own Company page: Tessera, a high-growth SaaS company on venture debt with a recurring-revenue covenant; Northwell, a manufacturer with a bank leverage covenant; Cresthaven, a hospital system with bonds and debt-service coverage; Lattice, a public company with a convertible and S&P's downgrade trigger; and Harbor, a PE-backed company with a springing leverage covenant.
The CFO Score = 4/15 Cash Discipline + 4/15 Capital Allocation + 4/15 Audit Trust + 1/5 Forecast Accuracy, the one number on the leaderboard, final report and gradebook. Cash Discipline is the daily average of liquidity against the floor (100 at or above it, 0 at half of it) less points for covenant headroom under 40%, a breach or an unplanned revolver draw. Capital Allocation is 50 + 50 × tanh(value created / scale), each project at its net present value at the cost of capital as expected when the call was made. Forecast Accuracy scores each week's range by its width plus ten times any miss; a week with no number scores 0. Audit Trust grades the calls that differ on disclosure or controls against the options the team had (best 100, worst 0, missed 0) and every memo at its grade × 10, severity-weighted from two neutral 50s. In the sim's own season tests (bot teams playing whole classes), sensible play lands in the 70s, random play clearly lower, and an absent team lowest. A student's suggested grade is 70% CFO Score + 30% their own work (25 points memo quality: their average memo grade, counted at n/(n+5) for n graded and the team's memo average for the rest; 5 points answering their share of the team's emails on time); once any team in the class claims a finance-team seat, that is 80% of the grade and role credit the other 20% (half owned work each week: emails the student's seat owns, and for the FP&A Lead filing the weekly guidance, for the Treasurer its revolver plan; half weekly reflections of 40+ words).
Value created by the projects the team funds or sells, at the company's cost of capital, as expected when each call is made (0-100; 50 = none created or destroyed). The post-audit shows how each project turned out.
The weekly guidance against what happened (0-100): a narrow range that holds Friday's cash scores well; a miss costs ten times its size; no number scores 0.
Judgment on disclosure and controls (0-100): calls graded against the options the team had, and every memo's grade × 10.
Liquidity against the company's floor and covenant headroom, every sim day (0-100): full at the floor and nothing extra above it; points off for thin headroom, a breach or an unplanned revolver draw.
Written memos (100-300 words) graded 0-10 by Claude as a senior CFO — judges financial reasoning, judgment quality, and stakeholder awareness, with a short comment and the company's books in view. The grade × 10 counts on Audit Trust.
Each industry track is a company with its own Company page and its own books: cash, each debt line at its rate, revenue, costs and EBITDA. Calls move real lines with timing; the covenant is tested every fifth sim day, and a breach costs a waiver fee and a higher rate.
Acquisitions, capex, a buyback, a strategic stake, a plant decision: each has a cash schedule and a planned net present value at the cost of capital. Results are drawn once per class and reported on a post-audit card a few weeks later. Passing on a project scores 50; sunk costs are sunk.
Each sim week the team commits a range for Friday's cash (the public company also guides EBITDA). The Friday card scores it: a calibrated range beats a wide one and an optimistic one, and a miss brings the board's question.
Professor picks active days, emails per day (1-5), response window (2-168 hrs), and total length (5-112 active days, up to 16 weeks). The difficulty setting adjusts emails per day, windows and how much a miss weighs.
Four seats: Treasurer (treasury emails and the revolver plan), Controller (audit, tax and reporting), FP&A Lead (forecasts, plus filing the weekly guidance) and Corporate Development (capital allocation, projects, M&A). The inbox marks each email "For:" its seat, each student writes a short weekly reflection on what the books, the covenant and the guidance said, and the professor reads them all on one page.
One sim day per active day: 25 on the 5-week format, 40 on 8-week, 70 on a semester (Mon-Fri at 3 emails a day by default). The professor can change the number of days.
Designed for ~15-30 students in teams of 4-5. Each team runs one persistent CFO office and splits four finance-team seats (one student can hold two on a small team).
MBA corporate finance, advanced accounting/finance electives, executive education for CFO development.
The only sim that puts students in the CFO seat continuously. Same continuous-operations engine as The Operator, but every email is a finance judgment call that runs through a real company's books (liquidity, the covenant, projects, a weekly forecast) — and the grader is a senior CFO.
One of many pre-authored prompts from the sim’s Week 1 debrieflibrary. Grounded in the team’s actual decisions and used as a scheduled teaching moment.
Week 1 debriefCovenant headroom as forcing function
Your headroom started at 25%. Where is it after Week 1, and which specific decisions moved it? Was the movement mostly one big spend, or slow drift from routine choices? What does the pattern say about your team's cash discipline default?
A single in-tray event drawn from the sim’s live event catalog — the kind of decision a student team sees in their inbox on any given active day.
Our quarterly covenant compliance check is tomorrow with our senior lender. Headroom on the leverage covenant is 0.4x EBITDA — too close. If we trip it, the lender can accelerate. Treasury sees three paths.
Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle via LTI 1.3. Students launch from your LMS with single sign-on; one-click grade publish posts scores back with the rubric breakdown as the comment.
Per semester. No platform fee, no per-section charge, no seat minimums. Institutional invoicing available.