The new age CFO and its financial outcomes

Source: EY Reporting

Regarding the recent interview with Mr. Ranganath D. Mavinakere, the CFO of Infosys said today the CFO’s role has evolved considerably, it is not limited to finance and accounts rather, increasingly, they are now playing a central role in strategy formulation and execution.

Ultimately, the outcome of corporate strategy is measured in financials, be it revenues, margins, earnings per share, or the return on capital employed. And all risks – whether they relate to people, technology, HR, or strategy – have a financial implication.

As a result, the CFO and the finance organization must have an extraordinary view of the enterprise – a view that other function leaders cannot have and to be in a better position to work with other business functions, to advise them, and to help them make the right strategic choices.

The new-age CFO is someone who not only takes on the traditional roles of financial control, financial integrity, transparency, timely accounting, and checks and balances but also has a 360-degree view of the entire business.

This helps in two ways, “First, it helps to challenge some of the business assumptions more confidently and emphatically. Second, it helps predict the financial impact of any business decision more accurately.” That’s because every decision, big or small, has either a profit-and-loss impact or a balance-sheet impact.

The most exciting part of the CFO job is to face several ever-evolving challenges. Digital disruption continues to change how business gets done everywhere, from self-driving cars to closing the books. Additionally, businesses embracing hybrid business models that are bridging the internet-brick-and-mortar gap need to experiment and innovate without spending significant amounts of capital and resources.

Meanwhile, globalization demands that companies comply with local laws and accounting requirements while simultaneously managing operations in each country. And, as if all of this is not enough, regulatory burdens continue to grow, and the CFO still needs to hit the quarterly numbers.

The Cloud, the CFO, and NetSuite

Source: NetSuite

A CFO who Leads by Focusing Resources on What Matters Most

It is the CFO that leads the planning process, establishing the goals and how funds will be invested each year, and for that they need a scalable infrastructure that can provide a single source of truth and actionable business intelligence.

Combining business acumen and expertise with NetSuite’s unified data model, the CFO can deliver actionable business intelligence across the entire enterprise by putting real-time data in the hands of the decision-makers, on any device, at any time.

A CFO who Transforms Proactively and Reactively

The best way a CFO can make sure that the organization thrives is to put in place a flexible infrastructure that can react to an ever-changing environment. Today’s CFOs need a platform such as NetSuite that does not compromise between scalability and control.

As business goes global, the CFO has to facilitate the transformation of multi-currency, multi-lingual, multi-book, and different statutory requirements with efficiency. Failure to do so can result in degrading a company’s operational consistency, controls, and visibility into standalone foreign operations. In these situations, the goal of maintaining one version of the truth is unobtainable.

A CFO who Operates the Finance Function Effectively and Efficiently

While leading and transforming, the CFO has another thing to do – run the existing finance function in an effective an efficient manner. In some cases, this can be more demanding than anything else a CFO does, but it must be done, and done very well.

With the ever-increasing amount of regulations, tax laws that are local, state, national and international, maintaining strong internal controls and corporate governance and reporting information that is accurate, actionable, and readily available can be enough of a challenge by themselves. Embracing the right software platform like NetSuite can make managing this menagerie simple.

 It is also important to get the information into the hands of decision-makers in a timely and accurate manner. The standard approach of generating reports (often through Excel spreadsheets) is no longer sufficient. CFOs need a system that puts actionable business intelligence and alerts in the hands of decision-makers in real time via mobile devices in an easy-to-understand format.

This post was originally published by CTR. CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023.