She Left Audit at KPMG, PKF Littlejohn and RSM to Rebuild How Finance Works | Esther Adeogun

<p>Most finance teams start closing the month before the month has even finished.</p><p><br></p><p>Cop a copy of my new book NOW: <a href="https://ademolaodewade.com">⁠https://ademolaodewade.com⁠</a></p><p><br></p><p>Turn audit and finance expertise into paid advisory work — Ethos (paid link): <a href="https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw">⁠https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw⁠</a></p><p><br></p><p>AI labs pay highly-skilled experts — Mercor (paid link): <a href="https://t.mercor.com/neABb">⁠https://t.mercor.com/neABb⁠</a></p><p><br></p><p>Build the design partner deck in minutes — Gamma (paid link): <a href="https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h">⁠https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h⁠</a></p><p><br></p><p>Esther Adeogun spent over a decade in audit and assurance across KPMG Nigeria, WYZE, Sapro, PKF Littlejohn and RSM UK, working between Lagos and London. She audited multinationals with US, Canadian and Australian parent structures. She then left professional services to found Valdore Systems and Intelligence Limited (VSIL), a pre-product platform building what she calls an intelligent operating layer: financial intelligence, controls and real-time visibility embedded directly into business workflows rather than applied after the fact.</p><p><br></p><p>The pattern that convinced her was not jurisdictional. Across Lagos, London and multinational engagements she kept meeting the same problem. Organisations had invested heavily in software, yet finance teams still ran on spreadsheets, manual reconciliations and judgement applied outside the system. Some of her design partners begin their July month-end work in the second or third week of July in order to report to management by 4 August. That is time taken away from professional judgement and scepticism, and Esther argues the gap between activity and visibility is the thing worth closing, not the accounting concepts underneath it.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>In this episode:</strong></p><p><br></p><ul><li>The one sentence she would give a Fortune 500 CEO: an intelligent operating layer embedding financial intelligence, controls and real-time visibility into business workflows</li><li>The exact shift from auditor to founder, moving from &quot;what went wrong&quot; to &quot;why did the system allow this to happen in the first place&quot;</li><li>Why real-time reporting does not overturn the historical cost concept, and what she actually means by real-time</li><li>What SAP, Oracle and Microsoft would