This article is in reference to:
Finance Faux Pas (The Satirical List I Keep in My Head)
As seen on: cfcx.work
The satirical list of finance “faux pas” exists because people use humor to point at what they cannot comfortably change. A short, ribald post about espresso machines, company cards and blaming NetSuite is not an instruction manual — it’s a diagnostic. It tells a story about incentives, friction, and the small acts that compound into audit night terrors.
That is why this piece matters: it translates a practiced cynicism into data. The laugh registers as recognition; that recognition is a signal that processes, tooling, and culture are misaligned. The list is more than a parade of bad choices. It’s a weather report about the conditions that make those choices feel rational to people on the ground.
What the humor signals
Jokes land only when they hit visible experience. When multiple practitioners nod at the same punchline, the joke ceases to be merely funny and becomes evidence. Two patterns emerge from the satire.
1) Normalized shortcuts
Many items on the list—rounding numbers, using the company card as an extension of personal spending, toggling off audit logs—are heuristics people use to reduce day-to-day friction. Those heuristics are adaptive responses to slow or brittle systems, unclear ownership, and relentless deadlines.
Shortcuts feel efficient in the moment. They trade traceability, reproducibility and institutional memory for speed. Once repeated, they calcify into expectation: future stakeholders assume the behavior is acceptable or unavoidable. The humor points to how “temporary” hacks become persistent practices.
2) Attention gaps and theater
Other items point at performance rather than function: using jargon to shut down questions, blaming a platform to avoid accountability, or reframing purchases as strategic investments. These are techniques of impression management.
They reveal a deeper problem than incompetence: an imbalance of incentives. When the system rewards appearance—smooth reporting, neat quarterly numbers, plausible explanations—actors will prioritize signals over substance. The satire is a mirror showing how governance often measures visible outcomes rather than durable correctness.
Systems that enable the behavior
Dig beneath the comedic surface and you find structural factors that make these behaviors possible, even attractive.
Tooling and its affordances
ERP systems like NetSuite provide powerful capabilities, but they also expose a trough of complexity. Permissions, scripts, custom fields and integrations are useful, and when misused they become instruments of obfuscation. The same affordances that enable efficiency also create escape routes for sloppy work.
When change logging is hard to read, when undo is literal and easy in production, or when customizations are poorly documented, the platform amplifies human shortcuts. The joke about toggling off audit trails is shorthand for the larger truth: systems reflect the choices of their operators and the boundaries set by governance.
Incentives, resourcing, and organizational attention
Time pressure and limited staffing shift behavior. If month-end close is a treadmill and the only reward for speed is applause, people will prioritize closing on time over closing clean. When finance is understaffed or consulted only at the last minute, creative fixes look like necessity.
There’s also a political economy: whose job is it to own controls, whose voice gets heard in tool selection, and how visible are the downstream costs of a questionable purchase? The satirical item about choosing tools by logo color is an indictment of procurement processes that rely on surface signals rather than rigorous evaluation.
The cleanup economy
One of the persistent, quieter stories beneath the humor is the labor cost of cleaning up after creative accounting. Audits, reconciliation, and incident response are staffed by people who inherit the mess. That cleanup is expensive, recurring, and rarely part of the spreadsheets that greenlight the original shortcuts.
Cleanup also has a cultural effect. Teams learn to treat firefighting as a skill and start to prize improvisation over process design. The organization becomes resilient in a narrow sense—able to recover from frequent errors—while remaining fragile in structural ways that make systemic improvement difficult.
Design lessons and trade-offs
The list, read charitably, offers a set of minimalist design requirements for healthier finance operations.
Make traceability easy. If audit trails are readable and actionable, flipping them off stops being convenient. Make testing and sandboxing predictable so that live edits are never the fastest option. Build procurement processes that weigh long-term integration costs and maintenance overhead, not just initial marketing polish.
But trade-offs persist. Overly rigid controls slow down necessary work. Excessive process can create its own moral hazard: people hide errors rather than surface them. The goal is not zero tolerance for all human creativity; it is creating predictable margins where sensible improvisation does not cascade into structural risk.
Close
In the end, the satirical list matters because it compresses complex failures into relatable anecdotes. It’s a low-cost, high-signal way to say: something feels off, and here’s where it shows up. That resonance is a practical lever: leaders who listen can translate laughter into prioritized fixes.
Ultimately, the fix is not moralizing about bad actors; it is redesigning the space where those actors make choices. Tools, incentives, and visibility can be tuned so that the path of least resistance is the responsible one.
Looking ahead, treat humor as a diagnostic. Catalogue the moments that produced a laugh, map them to system affordances, and address the smallest structural irritants first. A short laugh can be the opening move of a long process of repair. If that sounds manageable, start by asking: what quick change would make the worst joke impossible?