Jim Cook is the full-time founder & CEO of BenchBoard.com, a strategic advisory and executive coaching company. He also writes weekly at Cook’s PlayBooks, a Substack for founders, CEOs, COOs, and CFOs focused on lessons learned from scaling companies from series A to IPO. This article originally appeared on Cook’s PlayBooks and is brought to you in partnership with Brex.

There is no universal CFO prototype. CFO’s need various evolving capabilities at each stage of a company. I believe the modern-day CFO must be assessed across five key dimensions:

1. Overall Leadership
2. Strategic Impact
3. Operational Excellence
4. Communication and Influence
5. M&A/IPO Readiness

Each of these dimensions is comprised of a handful of key capabilities; each capability needs to be weighted based on the importance of the capability at each stage of company.

Bottom line: There is also no unicorn CFO who is strong in all five dimensions. Every startup CFO and even public company CFOs have gaps in their own scorecards.

In my 30 years of leading finance teams in Silicon Valley, I’ve found founders, CEOs, boards, investors, and executive peers struggle to properly assess not just what makes a “Great CFO” but, more specifically, fail to distinguish great (and especially “not great") CFOs by stage of company.

So about 10 years ago, I built my first CFO scorecard when I began assisting CEOs and their boards in their CFO interviews. I’m now on version 3 of my personally built scorecard. I’m now using this scorecard in my coaching/board/advisory practice with significant positive feedback from fellow CFOs, CEOs, board members, and investors.

Today, I’m publishing my CFO Scorecard publicly for the first time as I continue to pay it forward. My hope is to finally create a CFO Scorecard standard for companies as well as current and aspiring CFOs. I also find it very interesting that it’s now 2025, and while we CFOs have “scorekeeping” in our DNA, we remain like the Cobblers children and haven’t attempted to build a standard CFO Scorecard … until now.

As John Doerr most famously wrote about OKRs in “Measure What Matters,” here are the five dimensions of a CFO that I believe matter not only in today’s CFO Era, but more importantly for the next era of CFO.

CFO scorecard: The five key dimensions

1. Overall Leadership: (Presence, Team, Coach/Mentor, Partnership, Network)
2. Strategic Impact: (360 Thinker; Chess Master; Poker Player; Risk Master)
3. Operational Excellence: (Data Mastery; Decision Architect; Owner Key Metrics)
4. Communication & Influence: (Complex>Simple; Why?; Islands of Safety)
5. M&A & IPO Readiness: (Audits, Forecasting, Talent, Legal/Compliance, Data Room Ready; Investor Relations)

I’ve also translated all of this into a Google Sheet. After all, you can’t “Score” something without an actual spreadsheet, right?! I’ve used this spreadsheet several times with more extremely positive signals from clients, CEOs, boards, and executive teams over the past 4+ years.

If you want access to this Google Sheet (Template) for your own use, simply become a Paid Subscriber of Cook’s PlayBooks. Check out the full version of this post at Cook's PlayBooks for access.

Jim Cook was Intuit’s first head of finance and helped lead their IPO (1993), multiple M&A’s, and scaled their finance teams and systems to a +$4B valuation. He was a founding team member of Netflix, designing all finance and operational functions of the DVD envelope era. Jim also served as CFO of Mozilla. With its 2004 Firefox launch with $2M nonprofit funding to over $500M revenue and cash balance, the Mozilla team re-created the browser market and the subsequent browser wars. During his 30-year career in Silicon Valley, Jim has served as advisor to founders, CEOs, and boards and remains extremely active advising the new finance leadership stack of companies at the forefront of our future — including Brex.