Sarah Friar is up before 5:30 a.m.

She said so herself this week, in a post about how she uses Astra as OpenAI’s CFO. By the time she’s awake, the day is already scattered across Slack, email, spreadsheets, dashboards, the calendar, and ChatGPT Work, which pulls it into one update under four headers.

• Who owns it?

• What changed?

• What needs attention?

• What do we need to decide today?

Every CFO I know does a version of that triage by hand.

Phone in one hand, coffee in the other, flipping between Gmail and Slack and a tracker someone updated on Friday, trying to work out which of the six things on fire is actually the one that matters before the 8 a.m. call.

You open your inbox and someone wants approval for $250,000.

The forecast looks good.

The agency needs an answer.

You could approve it and move on.

But in another email, HR says the store has lost four experienced people. In Slack, someone on the floor says customers are waiting 20 minutes for help. Two have already walked out.

You would want to know that before paying to bring more customers through the door. This is the kind of work I wanted to test after reading Sarah Friar’s post about her morning routine.

I wanted to see how much of that I could reproduce.

I went back to Born2Cycle with a different question.

Could Astra read the information arriving between meetings and help the CFO work out what to do next? I gave it three emails, a Slack channel, a calendar, and two finance files. Then I asked it for a morning briefing.

I set the whole thing up, ran it, and read what came back.

This is going to make every CFO’s job easier.

Let’s dive in.

Building OpenAI’s CFO routine with ChatGPT-6 Astra

Step 1: Give Astra your business situation

To get started, go to chatgpt.com and start a new conversation.

Chose work in combination with Astra Medium or High.

Download these 2 Excel files below and import them to Google Sheets

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