For your team · The CFO Chair
Corporate Finance / CFO Operations · Corporate Finance / CFO Operations
Sit in the CFO chair — covenants, audits, M&A inbound, board questions — day after day.
The CFO Chair adapts the continuous-operations model to corporate finance. Every active day, the inbox surfaces 2-5 finance events: 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. Some are multiple-choice with explicit consequences (cash, covenant headroom, audit trust); others ask for a 100-180 word written response that a senior-CFO LLM grades on financial reasoning, judgment, and stakeholder awareness. Persistent state — cash, debt, covenant headroom, four CFO pillars — compounds across many weeks. Five industries change the texture entirely: high-growth SaaS lives in dilution and burn; mid-cap manufacturer lives in working capital; hospital systems live in payer mix and policy; public companies live in disclosure; PE-backed live in covenant whiplash.
Every team is scored on four pillars that compound across the sim. They aggregate into a composite the leaderboard ranks by, and the professor can see per-pillar deltas in the gradebook.
How well capital is deployed across M&A, capex, buybacks, and reinvestment (0-100). Drifts down daily; earned back through disciplined allocation calls.
Forecast discipline and ability to revise quickly when reality diverges (0-100). Missed guidance and stale forecasts hit this hard.
Whether the audit committee, board, and external auditor still trust your judgment (0-100). Compounds slowly; a missed disclosure or expired event dings it hard.
Liquidity hygiene and working capital under stress (0-100). Cash-out-USD and covenant proximity move headroom in parallel.
Written responses (100-180 words) graded by Claude as a senior CFO — judges financial reasoning, judgment quality, and stakeholder awareness. Quality score (0-10) scales how much your response helps state.
Persistent finance-specific state that starts at 25% and moves with your cash position. Below ~10% lenders start escalating; a breach is a real consequence that compounds, not a number on a screen.
Cash, debt outstanding, monthly revenue, monthly burn, covenant headroom, and four 0-100 pillars (cash discipline, capital allocation, audit trust, forecast accuracy). Composite = runway*0.25 + cash_discipline*0.20 + capital_allocation*0.20 + audit_trust*0.20 + forecast_accuracy*0.15.
High-growth SaaS, mid-cap manufacturer, hospital system, public company, PE-backed — each industry rewrites the events you see.
Professor picks active days, events per day (1-5), response window (2-168 hrs), and total length (5-112 active days, up to 16 weeks).
Flexible — typical: 5-6 weeks Mon-Fri at 3 events/day. Up to 16-week semester.
Designed for ~15-30 students in teams of 4-5. Each team runs one persistent CFO office.
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 event is a finance judgment call — 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.