Thinking of creating a new custom role specifically for our Finance partners. Permissions will be reduced so the menu options so they have is a simpler navigation, avoid getting lost. For example reports, dashboards, and budgets & forecast. Curious if others have used custom roles in a similar way and if so could you share the permissions you elected to use for the persona.

You can create a custom role  and control which applications they have access to. Through Report Collections and At individual report level, you control which reports they see with this custom role. 

We have a custom role for some users that can only see the service billing reports. Other roles that can only see project reports

I posted an enhancement request to have dedicated landing pages based on the user's persona (link).

Thus, we could have different reports with just a few buttons, tailored to their needs.

Please vote up, if this would help you, @Kevin King  and @Hee Sung Kang !