Today, an accurate financial position provides a competitive advantage; tomorrow it enables planning that is actionable, constant, and fluid.

Transcription

1 HINDSIGHT, INSIGHT, FORESIGHT Today, an accurate financial position provides a competitive advantage; tomorrow it enables planning that is actionable, constant, and fluid. One of the key duties of the chief financial officer (CFO) is to understand and represent the company s financial position. The CFO who can report on the financial position with great accuracy, detail, and insight is empowered, both immediately and for the future. For today, that CFO gains a competitive advantage for the company. For tomorrow, the CFO can create plans that are actionable and constant, yet flexible.

2 2 I HINDSIGHT, INSIGHT, FORESIGHT A recent survey of 157 senior finance executives, conducted by CFO Research in collaboration with Longview, found that the path to accurate, detailed, insightful reporting is paved with new technology, and the finance chiefs who were surveyed often find their technology lacking. When asked about the state of their finance function s technology, most of the survey respondents a combined 63% chose technological states described as inefficient, silo-constrained, or not linked to decision-making. Only 14% reported that their finance functions are at an optimized technological state. (See Figure 1.) Wanted: More Tools CFOs who are not supported by the level of financial reporting technology they need can be hamstrung, along with their companies, for future planning and initiatives. According to the CFO Research survey, only 12% of the respondents said they strongly agree that their current technology is flexible and agile enough to support future business-strategy and business-model changes over the next two years. And only 11% strongly agreed that their finance function uses technology to support new business-innovation initiatives. For current issues, this lack of support can cause bad decisions or more reactive decisions, as the CFO struggles to see the root cause of an issue. For future issues, this lack of support prevents the ability to re-forecast, course-correct, and make strategic decisions on customers and product lines. In both instances, the CFO s core role in supporting growth and innovation is effectively stymied. The finance executives in the survey explained that CFOs can concentrate on the business aspect more than the compliance factor and technology will allow better use of data to make decisions. FIGURE 1 Which of the following choices best describes where your finance function is on its technology transformational journey? Optimized (enabling data-driven decisions and supporting high performance) 14% Don t know 3% 11% Reactive (inefficient and using basic tools such as Excel spreadsheets) 12% Unified (using crossfunctional processes and common KPIs) 20% 23% Aware (process-proficient but silo-constrained) 29% Integrated (connected across the enterprise, but not linked to decision-making)

3 3 I HINDSIGHT, INSIGHT, FORESIGHT One area that poses a challenge to CFOs and financial reporting is big data both the large, complex data sets and the advanced analytics that extract meaning from them. With the advent of big-data collection, storage and retrieval, many companies are overwhelmed by the possibility of accessing data and analytics on their customers, their markets and, increasingly, their business processes. In fact, many companies find themselves data-rich but information-poor. Accumulating and storing vast amounts of data is the easy part; finding actionable insights is extremely difficult without analytics solutions that executives can use quickly and easily. % FIGURE 2 Technology and the CFO (percentage of respondents who agree that ) 49% Advances in technology will fundamentally change the role of the CFO over the next two years 12% And companies that find themselves armed with powerful new management technologies, such as enterprise resource planning systems, still can lack the other tools or data-retrieval technologies they need to take full advantage of the new technologies. In many cases, the challenge is that relevant information resides in disparate systems, and the task of bringing all this information together in real-time is challenging. More than three-quarters (76%) of the finance executives surveyed by CFO Research believe that implementing a strategy to leverage big data is fundamentally challenging, and 62% believe the value realized from big data strategies exceeds the cost of that challenge. These two findings show that CFOs know that important trends and patterns exist in the disparate data that surrounds them which can lead to better and faster decisions but getting that data organized and analyzed from a process standpoint appears at first look to be a daunting task. The surveyed finance executives also spoke out about these trends in discussing how finance should better support innovation in their companies. We need to have a more detailed and accurate data warehouse. Our ERP system is strong but we need to have better access to data, wrote one executive. Another executive indicated that his company needs a better big-data warehouse so his finance department can pull out specific metrics and trends in the data. And another executive wrote that CFOs also must adapt to and meet evolving reporting needs. As more information is available, better reporting is needed.

4 4 I HINDSIGHT, INSIGHT, FORESIGHT A More Strategic Role As CFOs adopt more advanced tools for financial reporting, some of the surveyed executives expressed the belief that the role of the CFO will become more strategic, and involve more planning rather than reporting. Technology is the key, and it can act as a major boost, especially to the finance function of the organization, wrote one executive in the survey. Technology will free up so much of finance s time, which they now generally spend in collating the data for its presentation. TECHNOLOGY WILL FREE UP SO MUCH OF FINANCE S TIME, WHICH THEY NOW GENERALLY SPEND IN COLLATING THE DATA FOR ITS PRESENTATION. Another of the executives in the survey wrote that technology helps make dependable and authentic information available to the CFO, which leads to factbased decision-making, business support, and strategic planning. Efficiency and agility with which the CFOs need to operate in today s world will be supported, the executive said, and technology will also get rid of non-value-added and repetitive finance support functions. That in turn will allow the finance organization to become more strategic by gaining a better understanding of what the company s results actually mean, enabling an increased focus on the drivers of business performance. Also, wrote another executive, finance can use data and analytics to deliver greater value while maintaining or reducing its budget overhead. About half, or 49%, of the survey respondents said they believe that advances in technology will fundamentally change the role of the CFO. (See Figure 2.) Conclusion New and advanced financial reporting tools influence not only the effectiveness of the CFO, but also the current and future performance of the company. Without the tools that technology can provide for finance, the CFO s abilities are constricted, especially for strategic decision-making and planning. Companies that provide technology to their CFOs will benefit from both the immediate bottom-line improvements in their finance departments efficiency, as well as from the long-term advantages from the evolving CFO s role, including fact-based, detailed analysis and planning.

5 5 I HINDSIGHT, INSIGHT, FORESIGHT ABOUT LONGVIEW Longview makes performance software for the Now business realities. Hundreds of thousands of business leaders from Global 2000 companies, operating in more than two hundred countries, leverage Longview daily to make strategic and immediate business decisions based on Now business realities. Their performance management software drives the advantage of planning with critical insights into vast and disparate data points. Longview brings budgeting, forecasting, tax reporting, analytics and the financial close to its single platform for out of the box performance management. With the recent merger of Longview and Tidemark the art and science of corporate planning came together. Longview s 25+ years of corporate planning domain knowledge with Tidemark s state of the art cloudbased platform deliver the most robust and innovative corporate planning solutions in the market place. Longview and Tidemark customers from around the globe unite. They attest to Longview continuing to deliver and now with increased innovation and creativity delivering the platform of the future, powered by experience.