Advanced Financial Management online

For decades, financial managers have pieced together and manipulated spreadsheets in order to report on past data and maintain the financial integrity of their businesses. Sure, if they had time, they could use these primitive tools to attempt to identify trends and offer insights. But this effort was ridden with information silos, dirty data and outdated numbers.

Fortunately, times are changing.

Thanks to the proliferation of advanced financial management systems, CFOs now have the power to be strategic in creating value for a company. By using applications to automate day-to-day tasks such as month-end close, invoicing and accounts payable, CFOs can focus on harnessing analytics and business intelligence tools to perform better planning and forecasting.

The CFO Alliance, a group of senior financial leaders from around the world, produced a study called, “What are the CFO’s biggest issues and opportunities in 2013?” The study shows that more than 72 percent of CFOs see their role expanding in 2013, and more than half (60 percent) expect to be more involved on a strategic level by helping set the direction of the company and ultimately creating long-term value for shareholders.

In its report, “CFO and beyond: The possibilities and pathways outside finance, ” Ernst & Young also found that today’s CFOs are in high demand for service on corporate boards and that, only a decade ago, just over a third of top-tier CFOs had non-executive roles. Gartner research also found that the CFO’s expanding role includes oversight of other areas of the company; more than 20 percent of chief information officers around the world now report directly to the CFO.

With today’s financial management systems, CFOs can look at the numbers and ask, “Where should the company go?” They can better identify growth markets and products. Rather than looking at past data and reporting on it, CFOs are becoming company stakeholders.

Technology allows CFOs to improve agility, respond to change and stay ahead of the competition. Advanced financial management systems are helping CFOs reduce the amount of manual work and data silos, freeing up their time to spend on future-looking tasks. With improved integration, everyone in the company can work off the same numbers and drastically reduce errors and duplicate or untrusted data.