CFO Magazine: Why Does Excel Survive in Finance Departments?

“Business processes can be complex, and data can be messy, McIlheran said. Cloud-based financial applications enable finance departments to move away from manual processes in Excel.

“Because of its flexibility, Excel can be the glue that binds imperfect systems and processes together,” McIlheran said. “It can be a crutch to bring organizational processes or reporting together, but ultimately the business “will, and must, outgrow Excel.””

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CFO Journal: 2025 Finance Predictions: The Pandemic Effect

“Some of our fundamental assumptions were on target. Underlying many of the original predictions was an awareness that the role of finance—and how it would add value to the business—would shift dramatically by 2025. As automation absorbed a growing number of operational tasks, the function’s increasingly business-savvy professionals would proactively provide analysis for decision-making, collaborating with partners across the enterprise in high-value activities like scenario planning and advanced forecasting. “Finance,” the report said, “will have a bigger say in how decisions get made throughout the enterprise.””

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CFO Magazine: Dispelling the Myths About CPM Implementations

“CFOs must understand that the benefits of CPM to quickly recoup the investment and lead to value creation in both hard and soft dollars. Among the former, the technology drives down costs by allowing business-unit comparisons to identify and leverage best practices. But there is a soft-dollar return that CFOs should not overlook. CPM technologies enable CFOs to realign their finance department work to higher value-add functions (decrease in data collection, reconciliation, and consolidation; increase in business analyses and support). And, the insights realized as a result of a CPM system investment help finance chiefs make more informed business decisions and more easily course-correct when circumstances change.”

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CFO Journal: 2025 Finance Predictions: The Pandemic Effect

“As real-time information moves closer to reality, and business analysis grows increasingly automated, finance will likely bolster its efficiency by offloading some responsibilities to captive locations, centers of excellence, and outsourcing vendors—all of which may be held to a higher standard. Lower costs can enable the function to invest in work that is building enterprise value.”

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SF Magazine: Accounting Curricula in the Digital Age

“Digital technology is transforming value delivery and operational performance of accounting and finance functions across the globe. This transformation, or disruption, of accounting tasks by emerging technologies like advanced analytics, Big Data, AI, and robotic process automation (RPA) influences the evolving expectations of finance and accounting employers.”

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CFO Journal: Built-to-Evolve Data Can Help Transform Finance

“A finance data model or enterprise information model transforms a generic ERP package into a specific structure to fit an organization’s business needs. Ideally, such a model would be tailored to the organization’s business activities and priorities while still allowing flexibility for new product launches, reorganizations, or acquisitions. A complex, layered, and well-defined enterprise information model can provide the business with flexible reporting, harmonized transaction processing, business model agility, and expanded views of transactions and profitability.”

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CFO Magazine: Can Excel Survive?

“But old dogs can’t always learn new tricks. While Excel has shown remarkable staying power, some experts believe it may now be challenged beyond its reach. Companies big and small increasingly need to automatically pull their financial data from multiple cloud-based systems and utilize more advanced data analytics. Excel may be a roadblock to that…While Excel is often used as a collection point for data from other systems, it is still a “manual and largely siloed vehicle”…Excel’s limited ability to handle massive data sets “can lead to long processing times and more steps than other database tools.””

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The Future of Finance is Digital

A recent McKinsey study found that more that 40% of a typical CFOs time is spent on activities that “fall firmly outside the traditional role of accounting, controlling, and budgeting. CFOs are dedicating more time to strategic leadership, organizational transformation, and performance management.”

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What Makes A True Data Analytics-Driven Organization?

Advanced analytics enable businesses to gain insight from data and to better perform in fiercely competitive markets. Most companies today see advanced analytics as the key to drive down costs, improve decision making, and increase customer value. But the challenges of a data analytics implementation can hinder these plans. A business looking to develop advanced analytical capabilities and become data-driven must have the right tools, culture, data, and people to support managerial decision making throughout the use of analytical technologies. Implementing analytics shouldn’t be viewed as “just another IT project.” It’s a fundamental change in the way that organizations do business.

Read More at The Association of Accountants and Financial Professionals in Business >