Dozens of market reports and analyses doubtless land on CFOs’ desks throughout the week, but a new guide from a financial executive peer group intends to break through the noise with a set of practical tips and templates.
On Monday, the CFO Alliance, the subscription-based peer group for finance chiefs, announced the launch of a new guidebook titled “Project Greenlight 2026: The CFO’s Fast Track to Execution”. The group describes the document as a “peer-built blueprint” for finance leaders in an era of rapid disruption. The new report includes concrete, practical suggestions, including reusable templates for several business scenarios, along with specific triggers and thresholds to monitor.
Nick Araco Jr., the alliance’s CEO and founder, said the new report stemmed from a collective concern among members that the hesitations of 2025 would carry into the new year. He said the intention is to help finance leaders “overcome some areas of execution risk.”
“Maybe ’26 could be a year of movement instead of what ’25 has been for many enterprises: a year of stall,” Araco said in an interview.
Araco said the Greenlight report marks something of a departure and a new direction for his organization. While the CFO Alliance has convened task forces and issued special-issue reports in the past, it hadn’t yet produced reports with actionable, “real-time” advice, he noted. “This is going to become our new norm,” he said.
The alliance began working on the Greenlight report on Oct. 1, Araco said. Since that time, the group convened over two dozen CFOs and other senior finance execs to talk through the “execution risks that most often stall plans.” Per the group’s consensus, the top four risks pertained to geopolitical and regulatory uncertainty, technology and artificial intelligence adoption, talent and team capabilities and stakeholder alignment and governance.
The report then walks through several suggestions to combat each area. For instance, on the regulatory and geopolitical front, the report recommends standing up a supplier risk committee and examining “dual-source top-risk SKUs.”
Amy Dickerson, CFO of Regenesis Bioremediation Products, said in the report that “as soon as the tariffs were announced, we identified impacted suppliers and renegotiated prices, terms and minimums.”
“Suppliers were willing; COGS impact was minimal,” she said.
Another unnamed CFO Alliance member from Denver highlighted how they used the project’s guidelines to adjust after a supplier was sanctioned.
“When sanctions hit one of our key suppliers, our early signal was DSO creeping up in one region,” the member said in the report. “We moved to a weekly 13‑week cash forecast, shifted 30% of volume to a backup vendor, and added indexed pricing clauses. Cash and service levels stabilized in two weeks.”
As for risks around technology and AI adoption, the report recommends updating acceptable use policies for artificial intelligence and adding segregation of duty checks for AI outputs.
Araco emphasized that Project Greenlight was produced “for CFOs, by CFOs.” He called out the report’s “trigger and threshold scorecards” as one area that will likely resonate the most with finance chiefs.
“CFOs are being asked to make faster calls in uncertain conditions,” Araco said. “These scorecards help quantify what’s often qualitative, giving leaders a way to say, ‘Here’s when the signal turns red, and here’s why we move.’ It’s data-backed intuition.”
Araco also highlighted the report’s suggested 90-day “AI and automation” plan. He described it as “the first AI plan that feels like it came from finance, not tech.”
For Araco, the new project’s success will be measured by how much it’s actually used by finance leaders. “We want as many emerging and midmarket finance leaders to use this” as possible, he said. He also hopes it spurs more peer-to-peer collaboration among CFOs.
“This is meant to show how quickly and with ease peer-to-peer sharing can happen,” Araco said.
