The landscape beneath the Finance foundation is constantly shifting, with an ever-growing number of tools and data to manage, fluctuating market conditions and workplaces evolving at an accelerated pace. To stand the test of time, companies must be able to react and make decisions quickly.
Despite knowing this, many organisations (even the well-established ones) are still wrestling with manual, spreadsheet-driven approaches to accounting and finance operations. Financial close is particularly rife with reconciliation and consolidation processes that waste countless hours of overworked accountants’ time — only to just meet deadlines.
The bad news: it’s predicted to get worse.
According to a survey by the CFO Alliance, 42% of mid-market CFOs expect workloads to increase in 2024.
Accounting graduate numbers are also dropping — fast — which leaves organisations relying on a few key finance people to essentially do more with less.
As a CFO, you likely already know the solution. As in many departments, the finance office is constantly hit with automation and artificial intelligence (AI) messaging — buzzwords that have become synonymous with financial transformation.
However, changing a business process isn’t as simple as hammering a nail. It’s more comparative to building a brick wall, and the only effective way to do that is — one brick at a time.
