The Missing Finance Course

FinOps – short for financial operations – is the joining of finance and operations. In a professional services business, whether that's an agency, a consultancy, or anything in between, that means connecting how work gets delivered to how the business makes (or loses) money. It covers everything from how you invoice and manage cash, to how you read a P&L, price work correctly, track the right metrics, and forecast what's coming. The goal is to give everyone in the business the frameworks to understand their numbers and act on them – not just at year-end, but as the business moves. How deeply you need to understand each of these things depends on where you sit in the business.

Anyone working in a professional services business. The course is built across three paths, so it's relevant wherever you sit. If you're a business owner, leader, or work in finance or operations, the Leadership path gives you the frameworks to understand your numbers, make better decisions, and build commercial awareness across your team. If you work in finance, you'll likely know many of the concepts – but the course is as much about bridging the gap between finance and the rest of the business as it is about the numbers themselves. If you're a delivery lead, project manager, or account director, the FinOps for Delivery path is about protecting project margins, managing scope, and connecting what happens in delivery to what shows up in the P&L. And if you're an individual contributor or specialist – the FinOps Essentials path gives you the financial context that many people in your position have never had properly explained to them.

No. The course is built for practitioners, not accountants. Rich and Harv deliberately strip out the jargon and build from first principles – cashflow, invoicing, P&L, revenue recognition, pricing, utilisation. Whether you have no prior financial knowledge – or you already know some of these concepts, the value of the course is in seeing how finance and operations work together – and what becomes possible when they do.

It depends which path you take. After the FinOps for Leadership path, you'll be able to read your P&L with confidence, understand the metrics that matter – from your staff ratio to recovery to billable paid – set up the right financial meetings, and make faster, better-informed decisions for the business. After the FinOps for Delivery path, you'll be able to scope projects more accurately, spot when budgets are at risk before it's too late, have commercial conversations with clients, and manage your team's time in a way that protects margin. After FinOps Essentials, you'll understand the financial language used around you, know why things like timesheets matter, and see how your day-to-day work connects to whether the business makes money. The focus is practical — things you can put into practice immediately.

You can complete the course at your own pace and track your progress. The total length of videos in the FinOps for Leadership path is 2.5 hours; for the FinOps for Delivery path is 1.5 hours; and for the FinOps Essentials is about 30 minutes. Each module also includes a quiz to reinforce your learning, and you'll get a certificate of completion at the end of the course.

No. The principles apply regardless of whether you're using Scoro, another PSA, an array of systems, or spreadsheets. Where examples reference tooling, the concept is always the main point.

Rich Brett is a FinOps advisor with 15 years in finance, 10 of them inside agencies. He joined We Are Social when it had 50 people and left as Head of Finance when it had over 150. He then led finance and operations at Kyan through a period where revenue doubled. He started Rich Brett FinOps in 2022 and has since worked with firms ranging from £300k to £60m in revenue. Harv Nagra is Head of Brand Communications at Scoro and host of The Handbook: The Operations Podcast. He spent years as a digital director and group operations director at a multi-entity consultancy — and built this course partly because nobody ever properly explained this stuff to him either.

Yes, and that's exactly what it's designed for. The course is free and built to be integrated directly into your business — whether that's new starter onboarding, internal training, or leadership development. Share it as widely as you like.