With the CFO’s role expanding to look at the “big picture”; strategic planning, maintaining trust in the numbers, and driving the company through uncertain times can place additional pressure on your Finance team. Pressure leads to pain points and, ultimately, problems.
Below are five of the key challenges that we have found increases pressure on Finance teams. We hear about them all the time when speaking with CFOs and their teams about the budgeting and forecasting process.
Address these challenges and you reduce pressure:
- Complex processes in their budgeting and planning cycle are so difficult to maintain and manage that they dare not change them in case they break. But constant change is inevitable, so they are always trying to make the budget model innovative without changing the processes at all.
- In order to keep up with the change, they must make sure the data is of high-quality and reliable. This in turn leads to more time spent amending incorrect data. Which, again, leads to chasing data duplication errors. This adds additional pressure on the time constraints they are under as a team.
- From there, a lack of communication becomes apparent. As one of the CFO’s goals, they realise that they need to work across departments to align goals – which create additional workloads. This initiates growth pains, both within the Finance team and the business as a whole.
- On top of all this, is the ever-changing demands of risk management.
- Lastly, to top things off all these processes and management plans need to be as cost-effective as possible.
That’s a lot to put a Finance team through. However, once our customers have started addressing these challenges head on, there is a waterfall effect. It seems to be about getting past the initial fear of change in the planning process.
It is possible to easily move away from your legacy processes, whilst improving them at the same time. You can reduce these challenges for your finance team – thereby reducing pressure. All you need is one agile solution.
