A bird’s eye view: How business and financial software can give the FD strategic vision

Overview

While the brutal economic outlook of the last few years moved the focus of finance directors towards the basics of cost control, FDs are now approaching a crucial period of huge challenge for CFOs who must ensure they have a broad and accurate view of the organisation in order to make informed and timely decisions.

This is not as easy as it sounds. In the most part, organisations have grown by accident rather than by design as different areas of management persued wildly different strategies. As a result CFOs must manage a melting pot of businesses which have often been bolted together from M&A activity and which, in many cases, remain relatively autonomous. Even if a company has grown organically, the sheer scale of global business today means that even smaller businesses can function as disparate operating units spread across the world.

In order to drive precise forcasting and earnings reliability FDs must adapt to these volatile and complex environments. As one FD puts it 'Software can make pulling together information easier so we can concentrate on the end goal, using the information that it produces'.

Accurate data is critical to being able to successfully perform this task. But, as this research report shows, the reality is that many FDs are faced with a plethora of systems which may or may not talk to each other and which are further complicated by a multitude of locally created and stored spreadsheets.