The Ledger
Curated content foranalytical business leaders
Tag Archives: strategic finance
SF Magazine: CFO to CFO: Staying the Strategic Course in Crisis
“Data analytics is critical to understanding the business at any point in time and very helpful in terms of being able to develop your pandemic response, stay ahead of trends, understand what your short-term forecast should be, and develop the longer-term forecasts.”
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.”
CFO Insights: How CFOs Can Rise to Meet the Challenge of Soaring Inflation
“According to one Deloitte analysis, the rewards of price increases often outweigh the risks. The analysis found that if a company with 35% gross margins raises prices by 5%, the company’s sales volume would need to fall by more than 12.5% for the price hike to impact contribution margin negatively. Of course, some competitors will likely hold the line on price increases to gain market share.”
FP&A Trends: Skills of the Future: How to Build Best-in-Class FP&A Teams
“The Architect: is responsible for building the bridges between raw data, key business drivers, and driver-based models into actionable insights that help make business decisions.”
CFO Journal: 3 Dynamic Finance Scenarios for CFOs
“The principles of Dynamic Finance can help finance transform from business function to dynamic capability—while still performing its steward and operator duties—for adapting to external forces with speed, strength, stability, and flexibility.”
CFO Magazine: 6 Areas CFOs Should Support to Build Business Resilience
“To make informed decisions related to inventory, business expenses, hiring, capital investments, and other areas, management needs clear insight into financial performance. Even if your reporting is timely and accurate, are you providing the right insights and analysis to run the business? For example, if you’ve recently expanded globally, are you providing analysis by country or region? Or are you still setting budgets and presenting results as a total group?”
CFO Dive: Finance is a Team Sport: 4 Ways Finance Leaders Can Collaborate to Deliver Insights
“With their strategic focus and statutory oversight, CFOs have always been utility players to some extent, and now it’s time to expand the bench by creating internal finance champions. CFOs who free up the finance group for more strategic work, take a deep dive into operational data, work alongside colleagues to address the issues that impact the business the most, and manage change skillfully, will have the best shot at an MVP award.”
CFO Journal: The CFO Agenda
“Although weekly reforecasting or monthly scenario planning may wane as the pandemic does, CFOs are not likely to revert to their prior ways of doing things. As a result, CFOs will likely have to demonstrate their own agility as leaders, equipping the enterprise with what it may need most: insight on what drives its value and fulfills its purpose and options to maximize both.”
Forbes: Why Today’s CFO Must Embrace Enterprise Strategy
“Aspiring finance professionals need to be agile and curious. We need critical thinkers who understand business value drivers and are adept at allocating resources towards the activities that will drive the highest returns on investment. People in financial roles need to be more tech savvy than ever to leverage automation and eliminate mundane transactional work. By creating “time to think,” finance professionals can deliver more timely, actionable insights to the business.”