Challenges wrought by the pandemic haven’t come with easy or obvious solutions—other than a measure of agility to adapt to new situations. For three CFOs who began their new roles amid the crisis, planning for volatility required an understanding of their core business, a focus on key priorities, and experience in tackling the unknown in previous roles. In this guest post from Workday Adaptive learn how they were adaptive and leaned into past experience to propel them forward.
Return-to-Work: Key Steps to Restart Your Organization Successfully
In mid-June 2020, a PwC survey of 330 U.S. finance leaders found that one-third of US CFOs now expect it will take more than six months to get there. Two months earlier, just 2% of CFOs anticipated recovery would take that long. Finance leaders are in a critical position to help assess the options and […]
3 Key Steps on Your Journey to Business Agility
Throughout the world, businesses of every size are feeling firsthand the impacts of instability. In a time of uncertainty, surviving and thriving comes down to how promptly your business can identify disruptive changes and proactively respond to them. That’s not so easy when your business is mired in static planning—characterized by long planning cycles, immediately […]
How CFOs can lead a budgeting and planning transformation
Instead of considering the budgeting process a rote exercise or an operational hurdle, CFOs and their companies can use it as a significant opportunity. This is now of greater importance given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those CFOs who are able to successfully transform legacy budget and planning processes can act quickly when faced with change, […]
How modern planning drives real-time business insights
From accountants to FP&A professionals, the Office of Finance is fast becoming the engine of insight in the modern enterprise. This hasn’t always been so. For years accountants were seen as “bean counters” and CFOs as gatekeepers. But that’s changing as powerful new technologies help finance teams transform corporate data into insights that help organizations […]
The 4 elements of finance and agility-and why they are important
There’s a lot of attention being paid to the concept of agility right now. Given the world we’re living in, that’s hardly surprising. Against a backdrop of uncertainty, agile businesses have the ability to rapidly adjust their people and processes to create more value and react quickly to changing conditions. Yet, from a finance perspective, […]
Why Financial Modeling Is Like A Superpower
Financial modeling is like a superpower—one that lets you test your assumptions and hypotheses across dimensions, versions, and time before executing budgets and plans, but every superpower has its kryptonite. In this blog we discuss how to generate flexible and robust financial models powerful enough to drive strategic decisions and help your business leap over the competition in a single bound.
Best Practices To Clean Up Your Messy Sales Ops
In the 1970s, J. Patrick Kelly, the first sales ops group leader, described his responsibilities as “all the nasty number things that you don’t want to do, but need to do to make a great sales force.” More than 40 years later, much has changed about sales processes and cross-functional collaborations, yet three things remain […]
From Real-Time Insights to Future Time
Insight. The one true currency of a finance professional. If we don’t have any insights to share with our business stakeholders, then we’re not helping improve decision-making. A lot has happened on the insight front in recent years. We’ve talked about going from insights about past events to insights in real time. Few finance functions […]
Are You Dying by the Hands of Analysis?
If there’s one thing a finance professional can do forever, it’s analyze stuff. We’re never short of data to analyze, and there are always more details to be ironed out. We love analyzing stuff so much that we almost forget the purpose of doing the analysis. The purpose is to improve business performance through improved decision-making. That […]
How Automation and Machine Learning are Reshaping the Finance Function, Part One
Here’s how more advanced methods of automation, including machine learning, can help CFOs transform the finance function to be more of a strategic advisor to the business. In a recent McKinsey survey, only 13 percent of CFOs and other senior business executives polled said their finance organizations use automation technologies, such as robotic process automation (RPA) and […]
8 changes for FP&A to make to transform strategy
Eighty percent of economic profit created by companies globally comes from 20% of the companies. Yes, the Pareto principle applies here too! What’s the secret sauce for becoming one of the 20%? The bad news? There is indeed a sauce and a recipe for how to make it. The good news? The recipe is not […]
