When someone leaves your team, what exactly walks out the door?
In finance teams, it’s often more than just a person.
It’s undocumented processes, nuanced know-how, and all the little decisions that never got written down.
The “how” behind the “what.” And when a new person steps in, they don’t just inherit a job - they inherit a mystery.
Every time a task has to be rediscovered or reverse-engineered, it drains your team.
You lose time, momentum, and confidence.
You risk delays during closings, missteps in audits, or inconsistencies in reporting.
Worst of all? These costs rarely show up in your KPIs. They show up in stress, rework, and dropped balls.
We call this the cost of reinventing the wheel - and it’s surprisingly high.
In finance, precision is everything.
You can’t afford fuzzy timelines, unclear handovers, or missing context.
But the complexity of finance work often encourages “personal systems” - spreadsheets only one person understands, folder structures buried deep in someone’s desktop, or task lists that live in someone’s memory.
This works… until it doesn’t. And when it breaks, it usually breaks at the worst possible time.
The solution isn’t more documentation for documentation’s sake. It’s about capturing the minimum viable context to make tasks repeatable, understandable, and improvable by others.
Here’s how teams we admire do it:
Process memory gives your team continuity.
It lets new hires ramp faster.
It lets experienced team members focus on strategy, not babysitting the basics. Most importantly, it reduces the friction that makes ambitious goals harder to reach.
In finance, structure isn’t about rigidity - it’s about making sure good work doesn’t vanish when someone changes roles or goes on leave.
Because the real cost of reinventing the wheel isn’t just time. It’s trust, quality, and team momentum.
/ Filip Ullsten @WorkTiles
