Key takeaway
A successful digital transformation of the finance office requires careful planning, strong collaboration with stakeholders, and ongoing monitoring and evaluation.
Transformation Mindset
The CFO’s guide to
sustained success
A New Landscape for the CFO
As digital systems evolve, and technology develops new capacities to analyse financial data, ways of working that once formed the bedrock of finance functions are becoming obsolete. Operational and strategic, CFOs and their teams can now sit at the heart of the business, providing in-depth insights and actionable predictions.
Preparing a finance department for the future is no simple task. The adoption of cloud-based accounting software, financial dashboards, and automated invoice processing has the potential to make the finance function more valuable than ever before, but it will upend long-standing internal processes and workflows that depend on existing, legacy architecture.
Beyond finance, other parts of the organisation which rely on the smooth running of the function will also be impacted. Today’s CFOs must lead and manage a complex network of relationships to deliver meaningful change, while ensuring day-to-day operations continue to a high standard.
“People have been talking about making organisations data-driven for some time”, says Piers Reid, SystemsAccountants Group CEO, “But now we’re beginning to see what that means for the CFO in practice. It means making data-based decisions, not educated guesses. It means embracing a hybrid, operational role beyond accounting alone, and being relied upon to provide insights and forecasts to the whole organisation, at speed.”
The CFO is the ideal person to lead this change. Their forensic understanding of the company’s financial processes, deep knowledge of the business’s goals and objectives, and drive to instil a culture of continuous improvement through technology and people will be vital for the journey ahead.
“These new abilities mean new expectations, and will completely change the role of the finance function, let alone the CFO.”
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