The Ledger

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Tag Archives: business finance

CFO Dive: 4 CFO Trends to Watch in 2023

“Scenario planning is also essential when preparing for the future economic or monetary policy landscape.”

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CFO Journal: Economic Brief: 7 Predictions for the New Year

“Without a doubt, U.S. growth in 2023 will be slower than in 2022 due to tightening monetary and fiscal policy. Yet a recession might be avoided due to declining energy prices, strong employment growth, and easing of supply chain stress. A recession remains a possibility. However, if it comes, it will likely be modest and short-lived.”

Read More at The Wall Street Journal >

CFO Journal: How Companies Can Build Value in a Downturn

“Improve enterprise resilience through assessment of existing capacity to sense and respond to changing market conditions. Considerations for scenario planning might include consumer sentiment and spend, demand sensing, and supply chain planning.”

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CFO Insights: Why CFOs are Moving Toward a More Dynamic Finance Function

“Embedding the finance function with enough speed, strength, and flexibility to adapt—despite what uncertainty may arise—can turn a traditional support function into a competitive advantage. A streamlined, adaptable finance function can enable an enterprise to capitalize on disruption-generated opportunities, helping the business advance its goals while rivals are still struggling to react.”

Read More at Deloitte >

SF Magazine: The Case for BPM

“For a single-source system to function and report timely and accurately, data structures between individual autonomous product lines and business segments must agree. This often requires the people in control of these segments to conform their thinking and find commonality toward the shared enterprise goals. Real-time financial reporting—flexible, manipulable, and drillable to any level—is entirely contingent on the commonality of the financial hierarchies that support it.”

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SF Magazine: Improving Business Resilience

“Business resilience involves both taking advantage of unexpected opportunities and mitigating the damage from new threats. Organizations may need to modify their business models by engaging differently with customers and suppliers, realigning their workforce, accelerating their digital capabilities, and optimizing their asset base through divestitures or acquisitions. Financial structures may also need to be modified as credit markets change and public sector relief resources and incentives become available. In short, individual companies are in dire need of guidance on how to make timely decisions to survive the crisis and foresighted decisions to thrive afterward.”

In navigating the complex terrain of business resilience, digital transformation emerges as a crucial enabler. The adoption of innovative technologies, such as a digital business card and digital twins, becomes pivotal in not only weathering unforeseen challenges but also capitalizing on new opportunities. Digital twins offer businesses the capability to create virtual replicas of their operations, providing a comprehensive understanding of assets, processes, and potential vulnerabilities.

Companies, seeking to enhance their resilience, can leverage solutions provided by pioneers in the field like Remsense.com.au. By integrating digital twins into their strategic framework, businesses gain the ability to visualize, analyze, and optimize various aspects of their operations in real-time. This not only facilitates better decision-making during times of crisis but also positions them to proactively identify and capitalize on emerging trends and opportunities, ensuring a resilient and adaptive trajectory for the future. Seeking professional services liquidation advice can further enhance strategic planning and financial management, providing invaluable insights for navigating challenging situations.

Read More at SF Magazine >

FP&A Trends: FP&A Needs to Be More Prominent at the Executive Table than Ever

“Planning is an absolute business imperative, and organisations are striving to be more intelligent and agile in the world, where black swan events are becoming a new normal.

In order to achieve that, we need to get into a state where people and plans are completely aligned, but so far, people are planning in silos with spreadsheets and disconnected tools.”

Read More at FP&A Trends >

CFO Journal: Improve Working Capital Without Renegotiating Terms

“Working capital process challenges can range from ineffective communications between sales systems and ERPs to inadequate technology training. For example, if the descriptions of products in a company’s sales platform do not align to the back-end billing system, manual intervention will be required to correctly reflect on the invoice what was sold on the purchase order, introducing both delays and the possibility of errors. Meanwhile, ineffective tech training for employees using systems that feed data into reports and dashboards can lead some employees to create workarounds and manual processes that introduce inefficiencies, errors, and—ultimately—inaccurate metrics.”

Read More at The Wall Street Journal >

CFO Journal: How CFOs Can Drive More Value Through IT

“In the not-so-distant past, finance leaders typically played a limited role in IT, periodically huddling with CIOs to scrutinize the figures in proposed initiatives or budgets. The discussion has now expanded into an ongoing conversation about how best to leverage tech spending to support the company’s strategic goals. That changing dynamic mirrors the critical role technology now plays in the enterprise, driving value and sharpening competitive advantage.”

Read More at The Wall Street Journal >