CFO / Boardroom Center

Monitor the financial health of the business from the ledger, and produce board and lender packs that can be displayed, printed, revised and shared.

Opening the Center

Select CFO / Boardroom Center in the sidebar. The page has ten tabs: Overview, Cash Forecast, Scenarios, Budget vs Actual, Covenants, Risk, Profitability, Close, Tax Reserve and Boardroom. Kantivo reopens the tab you used last. Each tab has ? icons beside its headings that explain the measure and how it is calculated.

Most tabs have an As of date, a Today button that resets it, and Refresh, which recalculates from the current books. Ratios are calculated on the accrual basis, so receivables and payables count even when your reports default to the cash basis; the measurement window is stated under each tab heading.

Plans and Access

• Plans: Professional and every plan above it. On Basic the menu item shows a lock and opens an upgrade prompt.
• Who sees it: administrators and the owner always. To give a controller or finance manager access without administrator rights, an administrator turns on the CFO Center permission for that user. Users without it do not see the menu item.
• Locking a period from the Close tab is open to administrators, the owner, anyone granted CFO Center access and accountants or CFOs connected remotely. Each lock and reopen is logged with its author. Editing the lock date in Company Settings stays administrator-only.

Overview

The landing tab answers “how healthy are we right now?” with thirteen tiles:

Each tile shows the change since the last month-end and a twelve-month sparkline; hover a point to read its value. Click a tile (or + Set target) to set a target and whether the value should stay above or below it. Tiles then show On target, Near target or Off target, and a tile past its target puts a badge on the sidebar item.

Cash Forecast

The thirteen-week cash forecast now lives here as a tab, with the same forecasts, settings, adjustments and accuracy back-test. Its full guide is Cash-Flow Forecast.

Scenarios

Scenarios are laid over your cash forecast, so create a forecast first. Then choose + New scenario, name it, and add one or more changes:

• Hire: the number of people, a monthly cost per person including payroll taxes and benefits, and a start date
• Price change: a percentage on future sales
• Lose a customer: removes that customer’s expected receipts from a date
• New revenue and Expense change: recurring amounts or percentages
• Loan: proceeds in, repayments out
• Delay payments: push supplier payments later by a number of days
• One-off: a single receipt or payment

Each scenario reports its effect on runway, the lowest cash point and when it occurs, and profit. Select several to compare them side by side against the base forecast.

Budget vs Actual

The budget variance report by account, inside the Center. Variances over your threshold carry a comment field: write the explanation once and it appears beside that line in any board pack that includes the report. Budgets themselves are set up in Budgets.

Covenants

Choose + Add covenant and enter it from your loan agreement: the lender, the measure, the threshold, how often it is tested, the next test date and a warning margin.

Coverage measures need to know which accounts hold interest, depreciation, income taxes, loans and, where relevant, capital purchases, distributions and rent. Kantivo proposes them from the Loan Manager and account names and shows them for you to confirm; a covenant it cannot measure yet shows Needs setup.

Each covenant card shows the current value, the headroom to the threshold and its status. When headroom falls inside your warning margin the covenant turns amber, before it is breached, and the sidebar item is badged. The covenant compliance certificate, a report you add to a board pack such as the Lender Package, states each covenant for a lender with its requirement, the measured value and the result, and ends with lines for the certifying officer’s signature, title and date.

Risk

Risk answers “where are we exposed?” as of a date, reviewing the last 30, 90, 180 or 365 days.

• Customer concentration: revenue share of the largest customer and the top five and ten, against a guide.
• Vendor reliance: spend share of the largest vendors, and any expense category that depends on one vendor.
• Receivables: aging by days past due, and expected collections over 30, 60 and 90 days, timed by each customer’s own payment history where there is one.
• Flags to review: possible duplicate bills, round-number amounts, entries dated on weekends or public holidays, postings to rarely used accounts, unusually large amounts for a vendor, and journal entries posted straight to cash or control accounts. Use Open transaction to inspect one, or Dismiss with note once you have checked it; dismissed flags stay available under a show-dismissed link with who dismissed them and why.

Profitability

Choose a dimension (class, location, customer, product or project) and a period. Each row shows revenue, cost and margin, and the totals tie to the income statement for the same period, with an unassigned row for anything not tagged. Export CSV downloads the table. Dimensions come from the tracking you already record on transactions; see Tracking Dimensions.

Close

The Close tab runs the month-end checklist. A strip across the top shows the last twelve months and when each was closed; pick a month to work on it.

1. The checklist covers cash (reconcile every bank and card account, Undeposited Funds), suspense and uncategorized accounts, AR and AP aging, depreciation, accruals and prepaids, inventory, drafts and pending journal entries, payroll liabilities, sales tax, balanced entries, and a review of the balance sheet and P&L. Use Edit checklist to change the default list.
2. Give each task an owner and due date. Tasks past due are marked Overdue.
3. Many tasks check themselves against the books. A failing check shows an Exception with the detail and a link to the screen that fixes it, for example the accounts not yet reconciled through month-end. Fix it, or sign off with a note explaining why.
4. Tick tasks off as they are done; Kantivo records who and when.
5. When the list is complete, Lock period sets the lock date so the month cannot be changed without unlocking it. Locks are written to the audit log.

Tax Reserve

In Settings on the right, choose the entity type (for pass-through entities the rates are the owners’ marginal rates), the federal and state rates or a single blended rate, the reserve account where you set money aside, the account where estimated payments are recorded, and optionally last year’s total tax for the safe-harbour comparison. Then Save settings.

The tab shows estimated tax to date, the amount reserved, estimates paid and any shortfall; a full-year projection with the amount required this year; and a table of quarterly estimated payments with due dates. Every assumption in use is listed beneath the figures.

Boardroom

A board pack is a saved set of reports for one audience, such as the board, the bank or the partners. Each run produces a dated edition that is frozen; refreshing an edition produces a new revision and keeps the earlier ones.

Create a pack

1. On the Boardroom tab choose + New pack.
2. Enter a Name and pick a Template. Templates fill in the period, schedule and reports, and everything stays editable:
   • Monthly Management: KPI summary, P&L vs budget, balance sheet, cash flow statement, 13-week forecast, AR aging.
   • Quarterly Board: commentary, KPI summary, comparative P&L, balance sheet, cash flow statement, covenant status, risk summary.
   • Lender Package: balance sheet, P&L, AR and AP aging, covenant compliance certificate, debt schedule.
   • Blank.
3. Under Period, choose whether each edition covers a month, a quarter, a year or custom dates, and tick any comparison columns: prior period, prior year, budget.
4. Under Reports, tick reports and put them in order by dragging or with the arrow buttons. The cover, contents and commentary page come first automatically.
5. Under AI and commentary, turn on AI insights if wanted, decide whether to Require review before sharing, and switch on the Commentary page.
6. Under Branding, set the cover title and a confidentiality line for the footer, and choose whether the company logo appears on the cover.
7. Save. Kantivo offers to generate the first edition straight away.

Schedule

Tick Generate automatically and choose the Frequency (weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly), the run day (for example the 10th, after the month closes), the Time, and what each run covers, by default the period just ended. The line under the settings states in words when the next run will happen. Templates come with their schedule switched on; custom-date packs cannot be scheduled because they do not repeat.

Runs happen while Kantivo is open, because the books are on your computer. A run missed while the application was closed is produced at the next launch, with a notice saying so. A finished run raises an in-app notice and badges the sidebar item.

Generate

Generate now produces an edition at any time. Kantivo asks which period it should cover, defaulting to the most recent completed period. If Close shows that period as open, you are warned that the numbers may still change.

Review AI insights

When AI insights are on, Kantivo Core AI (powered by Claude from Anthropic) drafts short observations from each report’s figures. They are drafts: a banner on the edition counts those waiting, and drafts do not appear in the pack. Open Review insights to edit, delete or approve each one. If the pack requires review, it cannot be shared until every draft has been approved or deleted.

Choose Commentary to write or edit the narrative page for the edition, in the manner of the MD&A in an annual report.

Display and print

• Display opens the edition full screen, one report per page with a contents list. Move with the arrow keys or Previous / Next; press Esc to close. Suited to a meeting-room screen.
• Print prints the edition or saves it as a PDF, with cover, contents and page numbers.
• History lists every edition and revision with its period and generation date; any of them can be displayed, printed or shared.

Refresh and revisions

Each edition records a fingerprint of the transactions in its period. If any are added, edited or deleted later, the edition shows that its data has changed; the warning is red if the period had been locked. Nothing refreshes on its own.

Choose Refresh and confirm Create Revision 2 (or the next number). Kantivo regenerates the same period and as-of date from the current books and:

• adds a what changed page listing every figure that moved, for example “Net income 42,180 → 43,050”;
• stamps Revised with the date on the cover and in every page footer;
• carries the commentary forward, and redrafts AI insights for review with the prior wording alongside;
• keeps Revision 1 unchanged, so what the board first saw can always be reproduced.

Share by link or QR code

1. Choose Share on an edition. Approve or delete any waiting AI insights first if the pack requires review.
2. Enter a Label that only you see, for example “Board, October meeting” or “First Coastal Bank”.
3. Choose when the link expires: 30 days by default, or 7 days, 90 days or no expiry.
4. Optionally set a PIN of 4 to 8 digits. Send it separately from the link, for example by text message. Five wrong tries lock the link for 15 minutes.
5. Under What the link shows, leave Link follows the newest revision on so a refreshed pack reaches viewers with a Revised banner and the list of changes, or turn it off to pin the link to this revision. Then pick This edition only (the default, so a link sent to a bank never turns into the next period) or Always the newest edition of this pack, so one QR code serves every meeting.
6. Kantivo uploads a frozen, read-only copy of the edition and returns the link, with Copy, and a QR code to show on screen or print.

Revoke, extend and the view log

Shared links on each pack lists every link with its label, created date, expiry, whether it has a PIN, view count and last viewed. For each link you can Copy link, show the QR code, Add PIN or change or remove it, Extend the expiry, open the view log (time, approximate location and device type; no viewer identity is collected), or Revoke it. Revoking stops the link at once for everyone who has it, including anyone holding the QR code, and cannot be undone; create a new link if needed.

Outside CFOs and Accountants

An outside or fractional CFO, or an accountant, who has their own Kantivo licence can use a client’s CFO / Boardroom Center over accountant remote access, the same pairing used for the rest of the client’s books. Both installations need a version that includes the Center. Inside the client’s company, the CFO Center permission controls which of the client’s own users can open it.