Welding & Gas CFO Club Recap August 2026

Thank you to all those who joined the 23^rd meeting of the CFO Club! We had 11 participants this month and a great conversation all around as always.

Topic #1 AP/AR Automation:

• Many are using automation to streamline their processes and gain efficiencies
• Nobody seems to be fully automated at this time
• Many are hoping that TIMS will be able to become fully automated
  • Sounds like 2027 should have an update from TIMS to get part of the way there
• This automation has helped with bank reconciliation
  • Some have been able to take those focused on this and put them on other projects or now have them working on other areas within the business

Topic #2 Doing More With Less:

• Discussed if everyone has metrics for their employees to gauge productivity
• Some are measuring metrics and others are not – it can be specific to certain job titles or roles
• A handful of attendees were planning to and gearing up to start measuring some KPI’s
• It can be challenging when some branches are bigger than others. Or one branch is in a rural area and another branch is in a heavily populated area. It is difficult to measure the number of stops for a driver when the drivers routes have a much greater distance between stops
• Other challenges:
  • Similar size branches needing a different number of drivers? Why?
  • Comparing TIMS to Samsara (GPS/Telematics in the truck) – drastically different times when looking at how long a driver was at a stop
    • Difficult to take action on this
• Things that some were measuring:
  • Cylinders per hour
  • Cubic feet per hour
  • Cylinders delivered by driver (each branch being different – see point above)
  • Gross profit per day (helps with the city vs rural if lower density has higher pricing than the high density)
• AI has been creating a lot of efficiencies for many in the group
  • Helping to generate reports once you build the template. Still need to manually double check
    • Taking hours of the time to create a quarterly/monthly report manually
  • AI is catching things as it learns to prevent errors

Topics for next time 10/14:

• Automated expense reporting (apps like Concur)
• Credit card fees
  • We did this one but the general consensus was most would like to revisit this
• Performance bonds – anyone use them, when to use them, cost threshold?

We hope to see you on October 14^th! Dates for Dec and Feb coming soon.