Any business seeking external funding has to get comfortable sharing balance sheets, headcounts and other financial metrics with prospective investors. There’s not, of course, any such mandate to maintain that same level of financial transparency with employees, leaving a wide grey area for finance chiefs and other executives to navigate.
For Wajeeha Ahmed, CFO of Boston-based water dispenser maker Bevi, being clear about company performance is a key part of leadership. Sharing these kinds of details, she said, “creates a sense of ownership” among staff.
“It is not a decision that a CFO makes on their own,” Ahmed noted in an interview. “It is something the management team and the CEO have to be aligned on, as well. But we’re big believers in transparency.”
To that end, the company shares performance details at monthly all-hands meetings, said Ahmed, Bevi’s first CFO, who previously held the same job at Barstool Sports and Vice Media. That includes disclosing how Bevi is actually performing compared to plan. If the company outperforms and has the ability to invest back into the business, Ahmed said, leaders will communicate that, too.
The larger aim, she said, is to connect the dots between performance numbers and individual departments’ efforts. That includes everyone from sales to marketing and product development. “The sales team can be, in some ways, the easiest one to follow: If sales does better, revenue goes up. But every team contributes in a different way,” Ahmed said.
Part of that transparency also involves explaining how a given team’s plans may affect margins. “As a finance team, you don’t want to be the team that says no and that sort of feels like a black box,” she said. “We want to give them transparency into how we think about these things, bringing them along on the journey.”
Ahmed emphasized the executive team’s approach to financial communication is, of course, subject to change as the company continues to grow and scale. The company, which passed the $100 million revenue mark in early December, may opt to change course down the road as leadership explores next steps, whether that’s pursuing another strategic investment or even one day jumping into the public markets.
“Where we are as a company today, this level of openness has been really effective,” Ahmed said. “As we continue to scale, we will keep evaluating what the right level of detail is.”
Decisions about whether to share financial details with employees are, of course, highly subjective and sometimes sensitive decisions. If a firm is not doing well, for example, is it a wise idea to share with employees? In some cases, experts say, it might do more than you know.
Ed deHaan, an accounting professor at Stanford University, said on a podcast earlier this year that helping employees understand basic accounting principles in a company can help both individuals and the company at large do better. That means not just sharing numbers, but ensuring employees understand what they mean.
“We think a lot about how to communicate financial information to our investors and lenders,” deHaan said on Stanford’s If/Then podcast in April. “We should think more about how we communicate it to our employees so that they understand it.”
Meanwhile, for Bevi’s Ahmed, the main priority going into 2026 is “squarely on execution.”
“The business is on a very strong path. We’re looking to wrap up the year beating plan, both from top-line and bottom-line perspective,” she said. “As a CFO, that’s always a good position to be in.”
