Nearly all accountants, business leaders and CFOs have interacted with an Intuit product at some point in their careers. While most finance leaders know Intuit for its QuickBooks product, the company also has many other types of financial decision-making software products under its umbrella such as TurboTax, CreditKarma and MailChimp.
For their CFO Sandeep Aujla, who has been with the company since 2015 and in his current role for about a year and a half, how he operates and leads his team stems from the success path he navigated early in his career. While he encourages employees to pursue projects and positions that challenge them, he is doing so in a rapidly changing landscape for both his company and the role of CFO. According to him, a strong CFO is not only a good leader who can be a proxy to the CEO but can also explain the product their company is selling thoroughly and set that expectation across the finance team.
Sandeep Aujla
First CFO position: 2013
Notable previous employers:
- Visa
- Goldman Sachs
- Morgan Stanley
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
ADAM ZAKI: You’ve said publicly that it’s your priority to move people on your team every two years to make sure they’re fresh and engaged in their work. You’re coming in on 10 years at Intuit. How have you done this for yourself?
SANDEEP AUJLA: When I started my career, I was in investment banking and, frankly, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew that it was important to keep my options open downstream in my career. This is something I talk about with my team regularly — this idea of keeping your optionality. I encourage them to pursue opportunities that challenge them.
When I took the CFO position here 15 months ago, it was a continuation of what has kept me engaged here: putting growth points on the board. We’ve gone through a significant transition, moving from a software business to a desktop and license-based business, and then into a SaaS platform with a suite of offerings. We went from being a source of truth for our clients’ books to being a source of truth for their business.
Although my job title has changed over time here, my mindset is the same. When I was working in the global business solutions group before becoming CFO, my team and I kept putting points on the board. It was a challenge, and sometimes I would feel my brain hurt, but that’s what kept me going. It’s about the challenge, the journey and keeping both the business and your career evolving and growing.
The ripples of the talent shortage are being felt throughout corporate finance. How do you think finance and accounting can attract more smart young people?
AUJLA: I think it’s important to make it known that accounting is no longer just accounting. Recruiters we’ve used to build out our accounting team have complimented us, saying our accounting team understands our products better than product managers at other organizations. My chief accounting officer can tell you how our products work, what resonates with customers, the regulatory requirements around our products and how the data flows through our books.
She isn’t just managing our books; she understands the business. She’s driving change in the business. So when I’m recruiting, I look for someone who creates value, assesses like a business owner and can own and learn from their mistakes. If they can do those things and be a strategic thinker, they can be very successful and have great careers in finance. There’s a flywheel of success that can happen for people in this industry, but changing the perception that accounting is bookkeeping is the first step to getting great talent into the field.
There’s been a lot of pressure on CFOs to produce ROI on technology products they’ve invested in. Do you feel this pressure, and is there a new type of technology that you and your team have found a lot of success with?
AUJLA: As a company, we started investing in AI early. We declared our strategy to be an AI-driven platform at the end of 2018. I’ve jokingly said, we started thinking about AI before people could spell AI.
Within the finance function, my technology investments are focused on freeing up people’s time so they can spend less time on day-to-day tasks and more time coming up with ways or ideas to accelerate the business. I’ve told my teams, that if there’s something you’re doing two or three times a week on a regular cadence, I want you to highlight that. Then, in what we call “Geek” sessions, I sit down with our engineering and analytics folks and ask how we can automate these types of things.
We’ve also used a lot of new AI in our forecasting process. We have dashboards that track the business daily and weekly, but the teams were forecasting on a quarterly basis. Then they moved to a monthly forecast, and eventually, they were spending more time on daily and weekly forecasts. So I thought, wait, I’m sure the machine can do that. We’ve found that technology has done a much better job. It knows when the Super Bowl is, what day of the week the Fourth of July falls on, and how that impacts payment volumes and flow. This has freed up hours for our FP&A team.
As CFO of a global company, how do you make yourself available to your team at a global scale while also implementing a proper work-life balance?
AUJLA: I urge the readers of CFO.com to decide on their own on this one, but I think work-life balance is a fallacy. What we need to solve for is work-life integration, and you need to do that over a certain time period. For me, September is slammed. My family knows that. October is a bit slower, so during this time of year, I have a good work-life integration.
I have three kids. I’m married to my high school sweetheart. We just celebrated 30 years this past weekend. We are blessed that both my wife and I still have our parents around. Family is very important to me. I allocate a lot of time for them by keeping my schedule consistent.
I wake up at the same time on weekends as I do on weekdays — 4:45 a.m. I’m a coffee fiend, so I get my work done early and then take time to engage with my kids with my full attention. I think it’s really important to approach time management with a focus on being present. There’s a great book by Cassie Holmes on this topic called Happier Hour —I highly recommend it.
A CFO at a company the size of Intuit can be easily siloed from the front line of the business. How do you ensure you meet the demands of being the CFO of a global organization while also staying aware of the challenges faced by all of the business’ moving parts?
AUJLA: I think this is where the CFO role is evolving. When I was at Visa, and they put me in the finance organization, I spent nine months trying to get out. But my manager was amazing, and he taught me so much. He would give me tips on what to prepare for when meeting with the CFO.
The CFO job has become a lot less about governance and managing the books — that’s table stakes now. In essence, the CFO is a proxy for the CEO. That’s why over a third of CFOs become CEOs, and I think in five to seven years, that number will rise to 50%. This role is massively evolving. I dedicate a lot of my time to understanding our products. We do frequent product reviews, and I like talking deeply with our sales teams about product strategy. They help me understand what our customers are asking for and help with our product roadmap.
At our level, it takes about 30% of my time to go deep into the business and the product. I need to be a proxy for the CEO and sit at the leadership table. I need to be able to articulate the business so that the finance team as a whole can influence change.
