CFO Magazine: CFOs Want FP&A to Marshal Value Creation

“FP&A should spend less time explaining the numbers, they say, and more time working with the business to manage them. As one finance executive told us, “I need an operating thought partner and not someone that is just keeping score.””

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CFO Magazine: Think of Digital Transformation as Modular and Nimble

These digital transformation priorities are listed as relevant to most organizations :

• Deliver real-time data to drive revenue.
• Streamline operational data to make quicker decisions.
• Identify cost reduction opportunities to save money.
• Reduce manual work to reduce errors.
• Improve analytics to deliver better insights.
• On-board new customers faster and more accurately for a better customer experience.

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CFO Dive: For Spirit Airlines’ CFO, It All Comes Back to Math

“The cost-cutting challenge stems from the mismatch between the short-term nature of the problem and the long-term assets of the carrier. 

“We had to create different models that no longer considered fully allocated profitability,” he said. “We had to think of the marginal cost of the business, and decide what’s fixed in today’s world.”

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Forbes: No Time To Recline: La-Z-Boy’s CFO On The Demands Facing Finance Leaders In 2021

“I often say the CFO’s (or any finance leader’s) role is to understand the business as well as the CEO, but then also understand everything behind the numbers! Business partnership and decision support are imperative for a strong finance function and a strong company. Expanding that partnership and structured thinking beyond near-term decisions and into longer-term strategy is even more powerful.”

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CFO Magazine: The Complexities of a COVID-19 Year-End

“As CFOs face the demands of year-end accounting and financial reporting, they’re pondering which issues need to be front and center and how to frame them.”

Here are the 4 issues that CFO’s need to think about:

1. Forecasting and related impairment analyses
2. Going concern analysis
3. Internal controls
4. Stakeholder communications

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CFO Journal: Financial Reporting Trends: Forecasting, Communication, Internal Controls

“While there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to addressing current forecasting challenges, the following strategies have proven to be effective for a number of companies:

• Evaluating recovery and financial forecasts from an outside-in perspective first—specifically, focusing on the factors, issues, and conditions outside of a company’s control that are known and knowable

• Automating components of forecasting to help remove bias and facilitate more real-time and frequent reforecasting as key drivers and trends change, while also analyzing data at a more detailed level

• Considering facts that both support and contradict assumptions regarding the company’s timing and pattern of recovery, sustainability, and growth.”

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CFO Dive: 5 CFO trends to watch in 2021

Real-time data makes the list, again, in trends for CFOs to pay attention to this year. Here are all five trends from Jim Tyson:

1. Increased pressure to adopt ESG metrics

2. The countdown to LIBOR’s end will grow louder

3. Targeted, AI-assisted zero-based budgeting will outlast the pandemic

4. CFOs will try to expand use of real-time data

5. CFOs will try to find the best post-pandemic balance of remote and in-office work

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Forbes: From Bookkeeper To Business Leader: How Finance Pros Shape Strategy And Culture

“The finance profession has evolved from a singular focus on financial reporting to a strategic role in helping advance core business goals and reacting to seismic challenges. The Covid-19 crisis has illustrated and arguably accelerated this trend, especially as it concerns risk mitigation, supply chain management and radically re-orienting corporate strategy amidst one of the biggest global crises of our time.”

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CFO Magazine: A New Year’s Resolution: The CFO Should Own Digital Transformation

Sanjay Purohit gives 5 reasons why the CFO’s role in digital transformation (DX) is paramount:

1. Successful DX is data-fueled. 

2. DX increases risk.

3. Digitalization demands centralization.

4. Transformation has a timeline.

5. The road to process transformation runs through finance. 

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