Why I Created SLOS — Part 1: The Gap I Kept Finding

Expertise does not guarantee cash safety. I had proof of that, four times over. My first was ERP automation. Nearly two years of extremely hard work — many months at over sixteen hours a day — fixing broken systems and streamlining accounting processes until financial reporting finally ran clean. A genuine triumph, early in my career. Next was transfer pricing tax. I studied the specific rules until I could negotiate directly with the tax authority, and saved the business millions. Then came global group reporting, across more than a hundred entities on five continents. I believed that if I could master this, I would have mastered finance. The reporting I produced was flawless, despite the scale and the currencies. After that, I built one of the most complex group treasury accounting processes from scratch. Hedging. Investment accounting. TMS implementation. Bonds and loans. I mastered the hardest technical skills finance has to offer, and delivered outstanding results every time. Then one day, I was told the business did not have enough cash to pay payroll. Why? I had done excellent work. Why was the business failing, not succeeding? Automation, tax, global reporting, treasury mechanics — every one of them is essential, guided by standards like IFRS, to keep a business operating and compliant. But none of them was built to answer one question: do we have enough cash, today, to survive the next ninety days? None of them was designed to sit between profit and cash, and translate one into the other, daily, with discipline. It happened again in my next role. Different systems. Different team. Same excellent execution. Same tight cash situation underneath it. That is when I understood the common factor was not competence. It was the absence of a standard. Accounting has GAAP. It has IFRS. It has audit rules. Cash liquidity discipline had nothing equivalent. Because behind every technically flawless finance function, there can still be a business quietly running out of cash. And behind every crisis like that, there is often a missing standard, not a missing skill.