When Finance Shows Up Differently
Early in my career at Gap, I inherited a process nobody wanted to own.
Every quarter-end, Finance and Corporate Control would book a conference room for two days, pull together a massive list of fabric on hand that was nearing expiration, and rotate the category design and production teams through to review it line by line. Was this fabric already expired? Could it be reused? The criteria were loose, follow-through was inconsistent, and the list kept growing. By the time I took it over, we were sitting on nearly $2M in fabric liability — material that was headed for a write-off and, worse, a landfill.
The process wasn't broken because anyone was being careless. It was broken because Finance had positioned the task as a quarter-end control check rather than a business opportunity. And honestly, the category leads didn't have a strong incentive to engage differently. It's a lot more exciting to chase the newest colors and fabrics than to worry about over-orders from last season, especially when the liability lands in someone else's budget. Out of sight, out of mind.
I was working alongside a production VP who was serious about sustainability and equally frustrated. We asked a simple question: why are we only looking at this at the end of the quarter, when the options are already limited?
The fix was straightforward. Pull the list six weeks earlier. Summarize it clearly for the VP and the category leads. Set a follow-up on action plans. Give each category leader ownership of their piece of the list and let the team know they could reach out to their partners in finance at any time in the quarter for a status update.
That accountability shift and true partnership changed the dynamic entirely. When the category leads understood what over-ordering actually cost — in dollars, in write-offs, in fabric that went to waste — they engaged differently. They got creative about reusing materials across categories. Their forecasting improved. And the liability came down to almost $0.
No new systems. No added headcount. Just a process change, made six weeks earlier, with the right people owning the right things.
The two-day conference room hostage situation turned into a couple of emails. The Corporate Control team was more than satisfied with the vanishing accrual. The production team stopped dreading the conversation because Finance started showing up as a partner who helped them solve problems before they became expensive ones.
That's what Finance as a true business partner looks like. Not a philosophy. A cross-departmental process change with accountability clearly placed where it belonged — and a lot less fabric headed for a landfill.