Samantha Singer:
Hospitality Finance and AI
A finance leader who builds her career on the restaurant floor talks food waste economics, why P&L lines cannot be managed one at a time, and what AI actually changes in accounting.
- Why Samantha Singer builds her finance career from the restaurant floor, not from behind a desk.
- What her current mandate, elevating food and beverage at a new casino, has taught her about running a hospitality P&L.
- Why food waste is a bigger financial problem than most operators track, and why chefs resist measuring it.
- Why food cost, labor cost, and revenue cannot be optimized as separate lines in a restaurant.
- The chef-finance divide, and what it actually took to close it over five years working directly for a chef.
- Her specific, unsentimental view of what AI already does well in accounting, and what it still cannot replace.
Samantha Singer has worked as a CFO and controller across hospitality and gaming, an industry where the finance calendar runs nothing like a standard corporate close. Weekends do not behave like weekdays. Seasonality is not a footnote, it drives the business. And almost everything on the P&L, food, labor, even a banquet booking, is perishable in a way that most industries never have to plan around.
On this episode of the Agent CFO Podcast, host Ashok Manthena talks with Singer about the philosophy that shaped her career: leave the desk, get onto the floor, and ask operators why they do things the way they do before telling them what their numbers have to be. The conversation moves from there into food waste economics, why a restaurant's P&L cannot be managed one line at a time, the real gap between chefs and finance teams, and her specific, first-hand view of what AI is already doing and not doing in accounting.
Watch the full conversation, or read the five deep dives below on the parts worth sitting with.
The five conversations worth reading on their own
Each of these pulls one thread from the full episode and goes further into it than the conversation had time for.
Why finance leaders belong on the floor
Why Singer traded her desk for the restaurant floor, and what changed for her and the operators once she did.
02The real cost of restaurant food waste
Why nearly everything in hospitality finance is perishable, and why food waste still goes largely untracked.
03Why P&L lines cannot stand alone
Food cost, labor cost, and revenue move together in a restaurant, and cutting one in isolation backfires.
04Bridging the chef and finance divide
What five years as a chef's director of finance taught Singer about closing the gap in both directions.
I realized very early on in my career in hospitality that you had to be a presence on the floor to understand how come the operators do things a certain way.
Samantha SingerWho's in this episode
Samantha Singer
GuestA finance leader with experience as a CFO and controller across hospitality and gaming. She is currently working to elevate food and beverage standards at a new casino, and recently completed a specialization in AI for finance.
View on LinkedIn →Ashok Manthena
Host, Agent CFO PodcastAI finance expert and host of the Agent CFO Podcast, with FP&A experience at companies including Google and Gap. Founder of ChatFin, the AI layer for finance teams.
View on LinkedIn →The floor time Singer describes needs the routine work handled first.
Every idea in this episode, floor presence, connected P&L lines, an AI answer you can actually explain, comes back to the same constraint: finance teams only get that kind of judgment time once the recurring, repetitive work is off their plate. ChatFin runs reconciliation, variance tracking, and reporting on top of the systems hospitality and gaming finance teams already use, with the reasoning behind every draft attached for review.
Book a demoSee what ChatFin can take off your team's plate.
Reconciliation, variance tracking, and reporting run in one workspace above the systems you already use, with the reasoning behind every number attached. Tell us what's eating your team's time and we will walk through it live.