There was a time when CFOs deemed it important not to take the first steps in anything new. CFOs are by nature very cautious people for good reasons and taking the first step was seen as something too risky and borderline foolish.
Back then CFOs fought not be first but second. Moving in second was seen as something good because someone else has already taken the risks, you somehow have some sort of predictability of outcome yet not late enough for others to have stayed ahead.
This is not the case anymore. Waiting for someone else to take the plunge and assess the result is no longer an effective strategy rather it is positioning your business to lag behind.
The pace of change is a huge factor to be reckoned with. In this digital age, it is important to understand that the present is fleeting and the future arrives faster than we want it to. The best a CFO can do is to constantly be prepared for the future´s arrival so that the business may handle its surprises better.
Traditional budgeting process worked just fine before we entered an era of ruthless and constant change. However, the world has drastically and promptly changed. The words artificial intelligence, full automation and internet of things are words that every single ambitious business is familiar with. These changes have not only brought markets and consumers closer together; it has also broken physical barriers.
As CFOs say, the business that can transform their voluminous data into accurate real-time insights is the business that will succeed. Data and its usage has become a CFO´s best friend.
That said, traditional budgeting process – the very same process CFOs used to rely on is seen as a process that must be retired. The disadvantages of a traditional budgeting process are many and known. Inefficiency, time-consumption, lack of agility, inability to motivate workers, and its inability to link finance to strategic decisions are few of its many criticisms.
Cloud-based FP&A platforms like Performance Canvas Financials promises businesses a more effective way to manage risks of the future, understand its business more deeply, and be able to respond and cope with the unrelenting pace of change in this digital era.
Performance Canvas Financials is a complete and unified FP&A solution that includes journal entry automation, reconciliations automation, drag and drop financial reporting, optimized budgeting and forecasting as well as automation of financial consolidation. The main goal of this solution is to streamline the budgeting process and automate those tasks that can be automated so that it can be possible to free capacity within the finance department. When finance analysts don´t have to wrangle with trivial problems, they will have more time and energy to spend on high value yielding tasks.
To end, technology is not the magic pill that solves all of the CFO´s problems. It is only a tool. If anything, this era of digital change will only expose the CFO´s leadership skills and the capabilities of his or her finance team.
This era of digital change forces the understandably cautious CFOs to take the first steps in order to succeed and lead. Embracing this era of digital change through adoption of robust finance platforms is the first step in driving the business towards agility and cost efficiency.
DSPanel offers cutting edge technology platform for business analytics, planning, and visualization. DSPanel designs, builds, and operates with the end users in mind. Performance Canvas was created by DSPanel to answer the unarticulated needs of the market not addressed by previous available solutions. With Performance Canvas, information is transformed into valuable business insights for the business executives to utilize in their decision-making process. DSPanel currently has over 2500 organizations deploying their solutions.
