Let me tell you three quick stories.
I was having lunch with the CFO of a $70M SaaS company when he dropped a quiet bomb:
“We have a 20-person team in accounting whose only job is fixing errors in cleaning up sales quotes.”
Why? Because 60% of those quotes were wrong. Not a typo — six out of ten.
That meant revenue delays, frustrated customers, and Finance constantly playing defense — fixing problems instead of preventing them. Even worse, the CEO’s response? “Don’t touch that team. It’s the only thing keeping us afloat.”
Two weeks later, I shared this story with a partner at an accounting firm. “That’s nothing,” she said and proceeded to tell me about one of her clients who had written a million-line code workaround just to scrub data from their various order, quoting, and e-commerce systems — just so revenue could be recognized. No one understood how it worked anymore, and the manual work just kept piling up. Every quarter, Finance braced for impact.
And finally, another CFO told me that at her company, audit fees skyrocketed because their accounting firm demanded to manually review every single contract change before signing off on the quarterly financials.
What was the common thread? The Deal Desk. More specifically, the fact that Finance didn’t own it.
A Deal Desk is a cross-functional team that facilitates the quote-to-cash process. It’s a centralized hub that brings together stakeholders from Sales, Finance, Marketing, Customer Success, and Legal to ensure involvement and buy-in to improve the sales process. Usually, the Deal Desk is focused on complex and high value rather than standard deals.
Originally, Deal Desks lived in Finance. They existed to ensure pricing, contract structures, and revenue recognition were aligned with the company’s financial strategy. But in the last decade, something changed. Deal Desks started moving under Sales Operations. The focus shifted. Instead of ensuring deals were financially sound, Deal Desks started optimizing for rep productivity — helping Sales close deals faster, often at the expense of revenue integrity.
And the latest trend is renaming Sales Ops to Revenue Ops. The irony? Oftentimes, no one in RevOps actually understands how revenue recognition works. Or the impact of deals on revenue recognition, margins, or compliance. As one finance leader put it: “If someone on your RevOps team doesn’t have a solid grasp of how revenue is calculated, recognized, and accounted for on financial statements and board decks, you might want to reconsider calling yourselves RevOps.”
Sales owning Desk Desk is like the fox controlling the hen house. Bad things ensue:
- Over-discounting and margin erosion
- Broken billing terms that don’t align with finance policies
- Compliance gaps that show up as audit nightmares
- Unpredictable revenue and end-of-quarter chaos
- Confusing or inconsistent customer experiences that damage trust
On the other hand, when Finance runs Deal Desk:
- Deals are structured correctly the first time
- Revenue is predictable and audit-ready
- Margin protection becomes part of the deal-making process
- Finance prevents problems instead of cleaning up afterward
- Operational efficiency improves as fewer resources are wasted on rework and cleanup
If Finance doesn’t control Deal Desk, it loses control of revenue integrity. Period. If your company has a Deal Desk, Finance should take it back. If you don’t, start one inside Finance before contract chaos forces your hand. Because this isn’t just about deal velocity. It’s about financial control. It’s about ensuring revenue is real, predictable, and scalable.
It’s time for Deal Desks to move under the Chief Accounting Officer. Before it’s too late. Agree? Disagree? I’d love to hear from you either way.
