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Driving Better, Faster
Decision Making through FinanceDriving Better, Faster Decision Making through Finance
In companies of all sizes, the chief financial officer (CFO) is the crucial link between strategy and execution. The CFO acts as a trusted advisor to the chief executive officer (CEO) in mapping out your company's strategic vision, and plays a key role in making sure that vision is realized in all business activities in a profitable way.
As chief stewards of the bottom line, CFOs are charged with managing profitability, exploiting growth opportunities, The CFO needs a assessing and minimizing risk, reducing costs, and, especially in the current regulatory climate, overseeing compliance unified view that efforts. The finance department takes the lead in managing the performance of the company by identifying key metrics, integrates multiple performing gap analysis, and overseeing reporting functions. data sources and KPIs, and places Financial executives make decisions every day that are crucial to the company's success. Those decisions need to be them in the context timely and they need to be based on solid data gathered from across the organization-information from a vast array of strategic goals.of metrics related to resources, cash flow, budgets and variance from budgets, inventories, and much more.
In order to work effectively, the CFO needs a single unified view that integrates data from multiple data sources and key performance indicators (KPIs), and places them in the context of strategic goals and financial plans. Armed with that information, the CFO can respond to current conditions and keep the company on track and aligned with business objectives. Only when IT resources are properly targeted, implemented, and integrated can the CFO obtain the necessary information visibility for better decision making.
Why Do CFOs Need Information Visibility?
Small and medium companies face unprecedented challenges as they compete in complex, often global, markets with conditions that change moment by moment. And within that shifting competitive landscape, it's the CFO's job to monitor and maximize the alignment of daily business activity with budget and planning processes, and beyond that, with corporate strategies and KPIs.
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Maintaining that alignment drives everything the finance department does, from executing daily transactions to high-level analysis and performance management. When actual results aren't on track with goals, the CFO must respond with prompt corrective action, whether that entails making a minor tweak or alerting the organization of major changes to business processes.
Financial officers must also guide the company through a thicket of regulations and industry standards. Compliance efforts, with their high stakes for the company in terms of diverted resources, legal liability, and reputation, require another layer of alignment with reporting and business processes.
In order to keep the results on track, the CFO has to have access to a great deal of information, including costs, revenues, assets, investments, resources, regulations, and more. And certainly plenty of data exists-and continues to be generated at a staggering rate-in most small and medium companies. But financial decision makers can spend Financial decision far too much time urgently scanning irrelevant, disconnected data to find the right information when they need it. makers can spend far too much Information leading to faster and better decisions comes from carefully developed metrics that gauge the performance time urgently of individual aspects of the company and make the connection to the overall performance of the business. If the scanning irrelevant, company's actual expenses are creeping beyond budgeted expenses, that misalignment can be traced to a division or disconnected data department by the CFO, and a corrective action can then be taken. to find the right information when IT systems can provide relatively simple dashboards of standard metrics, such as actual and budgeted expenses. they need it.But the real power IT can deliver to the CFO comes from its ability to tie together key data from different areas within the company as well as from outsi... [download for more]
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