CFO Magazine: 3 Hurdles to Moving on From Excel

“But Excel does not always deliver what finance needs at a time when organizations are moving away from manual tasks and siloed data.”

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CFO Magazine: Using Automation to Supercharge FP&A Teams

“How do you know if your company actually needs or stands to benefit from automation? If your team is over-reliant on spreadsheets, spends hours manually entering data, and has trouble processing and disseminating that data to decision-makers, you could be a prime candidate.”

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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: What’s Keeping CFOs Up at Night in 2022?

“After the roller-coaster ride of 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, companies around the world are eager for a return to more typical operating conditions.” And here are the concerns that at the top of the list for CFOs in 2022:

• Supply chain disruptions
• Employee retention
• Developing a talent pipeline
• Automation
• Digital transformation
• Leading business transformation

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SF Magazine: Advancing Digital Transformation

“Accounting and financial professionals have relied on spreadsheets for decades, so it should come as no surprise that there’s a reluctance to adopt other analytics tools. As Pamela Schmidt, Kimberly Swanson Church, and Jennifer Riley wrote in “Breaking the Excel Routine” (Strategic Finance, March 2020), “a bias toward the status quo use of Excel has hampered widespread adoption of more advanced data analytics technology tools.” Furthermore, Molly Boyle points to a need for real change in “The Real Costs of Manual Accounting” (Strategic Finance, September 2020): “The way accounting has always been done isn’t sustainable—especially in the current environment. Manual processes tend to be chaotic and time-consuming…”

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FP&A Trends: How Data-Driven FP&A Powers Smarter Decision Making

“When your financial planning and analysis (FP&A) becomes data-driven using automation and an intuitive platform with the right tools, then there’s a fundamental shift. The data flows freely, it’s trustworthy, and it starts to work for you. In fact, it can lead to a transformation, especially with decision-making around your organisation’s finances and business strategy. But how can you reach this point?”

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SF Magazine: Finance and Accounting in the Virtual World

“Accountants tend to be underappreciated by the business. But when the most tedious, time-consuming processes are automated, they finally have the opportunity to showcase their value. As they begin driving business outcomes instead of reporting on what happened four weeks ago, they’re more likely to garner recognition.”

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CFO Dive: Lack of Automation Preventing Efficient Financial Close: CFO Survey

“The key to driving tech adoption acceptance, particularly among finance and accounting teams, Choucair said, is to demonstrate how the technology is empowering, enabling accounting and finance staff to do more value-additive activities while removing the deadline pressure that accompanies manual processing.”

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CFO Dive: Large gulf between CFOs and reality on real-time capabilities, survey finds

“Almost 45% of CFOs say they plan to have nearly all of their finance processes and operations in real-time over the next three years; 34% say their goal is to do real-time scenario planning, and 24% say the ability to provide real-time insights is the highest priority of their finance function.

“By embracing change and pivoting to intelligent operations, the role of the finance function is increasingly elevated while positioning the company for growth,” Manoj Shroff, head of Accenture’s intelligent finance operations offering, said.”

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