In 2017, at Sara Textiles — a ₹300 crore export manufacturing company with over a thousand employees — a cheque landed on my desk for ₹12 lakhs. It was made out to a vendor: six consultants, one month, to build an MIS system.
I hadn't been part of the three-month discussion that led to that cheque. I only found out when it was already sitting on my desk, ready to be processed.
"Main bana sakta hoon"
I went to the CFO and said it plainly: I can build this myself. His answer was reasonable, from where he stood — stakeholders were already involved, contracts were already in motion, there was nothing he could do at that stage.
So I went above him, to his senior, and did something more useful than arguing: I brought him to my desk and showed him the Excel and VBA automation I had already built, quietly, on my own initiative, without anyone asking me to.
He held the cheque that day.
The terms were not gentle
One month deadline. If I failed, I would forfeit my salary for the period. I took a week just to plan the layout — because a system built in a hurry is a system that breaks in front of the people you built it for — and then delivered a complete, working Excel-and-VBA-based MIS in days, well inside the deadline.
The six consultants who were meant to build it came and saw what already existed. There wasn't much left for them to do.
The CFO's words, afterward, were not about the system. They were about what the system represented: "Aap is company ki asli sampatti hain." You are the real asset of this company. The bonus that followed — ₹1 lakh — mattered less to me than that sentence did.
What the ₹12 lakh actually bought
Not software. A question nobody else in that three-month discussion had thought to ask: does this need six outside consultants and a month of external dependency, or does it need one person who already understands both the finance and Excel/VBA well enough to build it alone?
The most expensive line item in most finance functions isn't the system. It's the assumption that no one internal could have built it.
Every 7AM & Realtime CFO™ deployment starts from the same question. Before we automate anything in Excel, Power BI, Python or SQL, we ask what's actually being paid for — the outcome, or the assumption that the outcome requires more than it does.