CFOs & Finance Leaders of growing businesses quickly add value when they scale the finance and accounting department.
Improved business process and automation in book-keeping, financial reporting, financial planning and analysis provide the Finance Leaders with the ability to lead financial strategy and scale profitably.
Lower Cost & Complexity
The value is seen when the controllership and the team can support the growth of the business, and the resulting quantity of transactions, without constantly hiring or burning out the group.
With automation, there is an opportunity to be sustainable with fewer people.
Coupled with the team’s ability to do more value-add and strategic work forms a group engaged with a great employee experience.
The improved retention and the scale of the team keep the cost of finance and accounting (and back-office) at a low level that doesn’t have to grow with the business.
Real-Time Access to Data
Automation provides an opportunity to access one source of truth for decision-making.
When your executives can request data and receive it in real-time, they are better equipped to make intelligent decisions.
Further, they can understand the data because automation means you can customize the reporting for the user with a few simple quirks. The engineer can have their waterfall graph, the corporate development team can see a table, and the marketing director can see visual charts.
Lastly, automation reduces the errors too.
The data is reliable, and the manual efforts and reconciliation resulting in complexity and mistakes are concentrated.
Robust data supports growth and agile decision-making along with in-depth analysis.
Confidence & Executive Work
With error-free data, CFOs and Finance Leaders can have confidence.
They can show up calm and with vital information.
They are supported by an engaged team and can step up strategically.
Too often in a growing business, there’s a lack of investment in finance and accounting resulting in CFOs doing controller work or even book-keeping.
When you are in the weeds, you don’t have time or the ability to think of a bigger picture or long-term.
And you don’t show up as an executive, which means that decision-making lacks financial strategy.
When one of our CFOs joined a $20m business, there was no process for consolidation, no month-ends being prepared, and no financial reporting. We quickly worked with basic excel, Dext, and QBO to set up operations and limited automation.
With optical character recognition, we could process hundreds of invoices through scanning and automatic journal entries. With an excel model, we could consolidate and see our financials at an executive level. With financial reporting, we could start analysis and discussions on results and support decisions with trends and historical information.
Over time we advanced to an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, and we eliminated manual efforts and put in controls.
We had a foundation for growth and the opportunity to further advance with workflows, integrations, and modules such as financial planning and analysis or budgeting.
As a result of these investments, the Controller could handle daily cash-flow management, ten business days close, illustrative visual financials and requested analysis.
The CFO focused on coaching, showing up as an executive, bringing financial strategy to decision making, and managing board and investors.
Without automation, we would have needed all hands on deck for table stake record-keeping and our CFO would have been in those weeds too.
We also had to clean up errors and put in manual checks and balances that would have burnt out the team.
The return on investment is confidence, financial strategy, and scalable profit.
Putting money into back-office functions is challenging, but it’s also foundational to growth.