Your Organization Doesn’t Have Bad Processes — It Has Invisible Ones
Lindsay Ramirez
Your organization does not have bad processes. It has processes that no one will admit exist.
They live in:
- Spreadsheets named FINAL_v7_USETHISONE
- Email threads from 2019
- Someone’s personal tracker that mysteriously runs the business
- A tribal knowledge vault that left when Dave retired
And somehow… Finance owns all of it now.
Welcome to Workflow Archaeology. Finance spends an alarming amount of time doing work that technically shouldn’t exist. Not because Finance is inefficient — but because:
- The workflow was never documented
- The handoff was never defined
- The workaround quietly became “how we do things”
So now close, audits, ERP work, integrations, and asset onboarding all rely on: “Well, this is how we’ve always done it.” Which is not a process. It’s a bedtime story.
How This Becomes a Q1 Disaster. Invisible workflows are mostly annoying… until Q1. That’s when:
- Auditors ask why something works the way it does
- ERP implementations try to automate chaos
- Integrations force two invisible processes to collide
And suddenly Finance is asked to explain:
- A process it didn’t design
- A workflow it inherited
- Logic that only made sense to someone who no longer works here
Nothing exposes fake processes faster than an auditor with time and curiosity.
The Quiet Truth Finance Leaders Know Finance doesn’t resist process improvement.
Finance just doesn’t have time to fix workflows while:
- Closing the books
- Answering auditors
- Reconciling data from five systems
- Translating Ops decisions into numbers
So the ghosts remain. And Finance keeps feeding them. Until one day someone asks:
“Why does this take so long?”
And Finance stares into the distance… remembering all the workflows no one wanted to name.
