Good to Great: How to Scale With an Outsourced CFO

COVID-19 accelerated a professional revolution that was already in progress - digital transformation. To remain relevant and competitive, businesses must embrace new digital technologies, and CFOs are positioned to lead the charge. Where do they start?

Adapting Manual Processes

Finance departments manage cycles of recurring manual processes, but digital transformation helps to speed up electronic processing. When employees spend less time inputting data and crunching numbers, they can turn their attention to more valuable activities, such as analysing data.

Embracing Cloud Computing (SaaS)

Many businesses have been using cloud computing for years. A 2017 Deloitte survey reported that 93 percent of companies already used cloud services in some capacity, and that number is certainly higher today.

CFOs are helping to define and drive their organisations’ cloud strategy, especially in two areas:

• Accounting and financial impacts and how different cloud schematics may affect them.
• Communicating those cloud impacts to analysts and investors.

Cloud computing and SaaS (software as a service) have the potential to cut costs and give businesses access to greater IT capabilities than they could otherwise justify. Additionally, cloud adoption makes it possible for businesses to focus more resources on their core business activities outside of IT.

Tracking Real-Time Data

In many industries, executives must make decisions quickly. CFOs who embrace advanced analytics can provide real-time data to key decision-makers, giving them actionable insights at a moment’s notice.

Since CFOs shoulder the burden of the company’s fiscal well being, they like to see all pertinent data in one dashboard. Therefore, many CFOs are digitising data reports using a central, interactive hub accessible to the organisation’s executives. Dashboards host dynamic financial KPIs and analytical tools. With so much data available, it must be packaged in a digestible, consolidated format.

Using Master Data Management

Master data management (MDM) is the complex process used to centralise, organise, manage, categorise, synchronise and enrich master data according to the business. Your MDM encompasses rules of the sales, marketing and operational strategies of your organisation.

• Master data management can help:
• Ensure regulatory compliance
• Save time and reduce operational costs
• Improve customer satisfaction by updating their data and eliminating errors
• Improve scalability by increasing the amount of data the organisation can handle
• Eliminate errors and improve data quality.

Master Data Management effectively transforms raw data into structured information that other business processes can use. It makes data usable and readily available across the organisation’s platform.

Detecting Fraud

Detecting, predicting and controlling fraud can distract CFOs from focusing on more strategic priorities, but there’s no getting around it. Aussie businesses lose $1.5 billion each year to various fraudulent activities.

Fortunately, with Artificial Intelligence (AI), CFOs can analyse and interpret expense figures to identify suspicious claims. Using programs that explore spending patterns and employee behaviours, CFOs can predict common behaviours used by workers who falsify claims.

CFOs as the Drivers of Digital Transformation

The pandemic has certainly elevated digital transformation as a business priority. More than ever, businesses feel the need to be agile and streamlined, and digital solutions can help with both priorities. While COVID-19 has been the catalyst, smart business leaders know that efficiency and agility are crucial to surviving any disruption. And beyond simple survival, these traits help a business to thrive.

CFOs are perfectly positioned to drive digital transformation. The role has evolved from managing compliance and accounting to providing strategic leadership and driving digital transformation. Today’s chief financial officers need digital tools that help them deliver on their core competencies. Their leadership drives the digital plan throughout the organisation.

If your business is ready for a digital transformation, reach out to us at Altus. We can provide a host of services to assist you through the process, from CFO services to consulting and corporate advisory. Let’s work together to take your business to the next level!