CFO Journal: Reimagine the Future of Internal Controls

“Organizations can leverage the recent rapid acceleration of digital transformations to automate and monitor many controls operations. Automation can help alleviate some of the pressure on internal controls functions, reduce costs, drive efficiency, and promote effective management of risks and opportunities. Automation combined with powerful analytics can also create transparency into key risks, business objectives, and controls in a visualized fashion, building confidence, intelligence, and performance—three important elements of an effective FoC strategy.”

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SF Magazine: From Controller to CFO

Some of the ways that controllers provide increased value:

• Driving finance transformation through automation and process improvement
• Overseeing the integrity of financial data coming from technology systems within the enterprise
• Providing enhanced information for decision making and resource allocation
• Increasing speed in reporting critical information and decision makers

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CFO Journal: Reduce Misstatement Risk While Creating Value

“Advanced technology, including automated workflow and controls testing, is an increasingly common feature of a modern internal control environment. These tools can provide real-time information and seamless communication among critical stakeholders—control owners, the internal controls team, and external auditors—to provide an efficient, effective program.”

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CFO Journal: It’s Time for a Controllership Reboot

“The pandemic brought with it an unpredictable global environment and uncertain future. This decreased the value of historical financial reporting while increasing the need for real-time reporting, including data analysis, and predictive forecasting. Finding new ways to leverage real-time data and new forecast models, controllership could manage against multiple views and plausible scenarios to remain agile and resilient against an unpredictable future.”

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CFO Journal: By Stepping Up, Controllers Can Keep Pace With New Demands

“As CFOs turn their attention to these enterprise-level and business model transformations, they often rely more on their controllers to drive finance transformation. Why? Controllers are critical to the three outcomes finance transformation seeks to deliver: enhanced information for decision-making and resource allocation; increased speed in reporting critical information to decision-makers; and increased productivity, cost efficiency, and capabilities of the finance organization.”

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CFO Journal: For Controllers, a New Agenda: Delivering More Value

“Controllers, as independent observers, are in an ideal position to bring more structure and discipline to decision-making processes, ensuring value is realized from capital allocation. They can review the efficacy of past business decisions that relied on assumptions that may no longer be valid and help develop a disciplined, yet agile, process for adjusting future capital allocations. Ensuring there is an evaluation and feedback loop for decisions in the event conditions or facts have changed, as well as a process for course-correcting, falls squarely in the controller’s domain. In fact, this responsibility is one the controllership should own as an unbiased, independent arbitrator of the decision-making process in the organization.”

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CFO Journal: Future of Controllership: Data-Driven Strategy Partner

“The finance function is evolving, and with it the financial workforce. Digital transformation is sparking new ideas about how controllerships can operate and what value they can offer the business.”

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Improving Unit Margins

“Pricing to maintain margin is difficult when customer demand is unpredictable, raw material costs are rising and you’re being hit with unforeseen expenses like retrofitting locations for safety. Maintaining an appropriate utilization across the organization and tracking project-by-project profitability helps ensure that your overall gross profit margin as a company stays on track.”

Read more at Brainyard >

Industrial Companies: Control Indirect Costs to Gain Profits

“Maintaining profits and growth is going to be very difficult. However, regardless of the larger economic environment, companies can take actions that can help. Specifically, many companies are seeing the share of general and administrative (G&A) costs increase. From 2008 to 2015, G&A expenses grew more slowly than revenues (41.8 percent versus 61 percent). Since then, the trend has reversed, with G&A expenses rising faster—15.4 percent compared with 6.0 percent revenue growth. Traditional cost-optimization approaches are yielding diminishing returns; if revenues begin to fall, then, so will profits.”

Read more at McKinsey Digital >