What is FinOps?

Steve Cassidy finds out how the traditional accounting department can benefit from modern tech methodologies

FinOps? Sounds fishy.

Very witty. In fact, FinOps most commonly refers to accounting functions making use of cloud services and platforms – so it’s one place where you definitely don’t want any fishy business. The name is, of course, an awkward construction chopped out of “finance” and “operations”, and derives its meaning from the existing context of DevOps. This, you will recall, refers to writing your own custom orchestration code to drive your hybrid server assets.

So with FinOps we write our own custom accounting code? That sounds risky.

Don’t worry, it’s not really a direct equivalent to DevOps. FinOps is less about developers, and more about bringing modern IT practices and functions to the realm of finance – so you can sweep away esoteric processes that may have evolved over years and decades, and replace them with speedy, rule-based automations.

Is it basically about moving our finances into the cloud, then?

I did mention the cloud above, but that’s not a necessary part of it. You could have a whole FinOps portfolio of projects, without spending a single penny on cloud services. The key idea is really automation, and that can take place anywhere. In fact, one of the most troublesome things about pure finance departments is often where they choose to keep their data: just when you think you’ve justified a total cloud architecture, up they pop with demands for local infrastructure and specialist hosted services. To be fair, they’re focused on fundamental accounting issues, such as keeping an eye on reporting and retaining control of the cashflow, rather than month-to-month efficiencies.

This sounds like a simple idea – why does it need a dedicated FinOps Foundation to promote it?

Finance is a formidable institution. Its practitioners have numerous professional bodies, colleges, academic qualifications, letters after their names – the whole thing. In the face of such an impressive corps, IT teams may feel rather underpowered to promote innovation. The FinOps Foundation ( is there to provide practical and informational support, along with evidence of how technology can deliver strong oversight and – in all likelihood – better reporting than the humans can currently fit into the working day.

finops.org) Are the potential benefits really that big?

Bill Gates once observed that people overestimate the initial impact of technologies, and underestimate the longer-term effects. In the short term, there’s definitely a limit to how much accounting and financial management can, or should, be delegated to machines: warring AIs are blamed for at least one of the last four recessions. But if you look forward ten or 20 years, it’s impossible to imagine that successful companies won’t be exploiting advances in automation and AI to make their finance functions smarter and more efficient.

Is AI really necessary? Aren’t we just putting together balance sheets here?

If your business is that simple then I’m quite jealous. It’s hard to achieve the level of security demanded by most money-moving bodies in Excel. In most cases you’ll need something more – for example, code that looks at your rules and requests, and tries to output them as a set of connections to third-party services, some checkand-balance work and a private report of any exceptions encountered en route. Of course, if you do have any simple, easily expressed tasks then those are the perfect starting point for your FinOps project.