Key data not making its way to the CFO

Aged care finance professionals need access to relevant and accurate information to make the best decisions, but our research shows that most financial officers are not getting access to the data they need, writes Craig Charlton.

The decisions that finance professionals make can impact everything from workforce management plans, procurement and resourcing to growth, profitability and the customer experience.

Therefore they need access to relevant, timely, accurate information to make the best decisions on behalf of their organisations.

However, new research commissioned by Epicor and conducted by Redshift Research found that almost half of the 1,532 chief financial officers (CFOs) surveyed and a third of the more than 100 Australian CFOs said they had to rely on “gut-feel” to make business decisions, in order to compensate for a lack of hard data.

The survey involved financial decision makers in businesses with 100-plus staff spanning the manufacturing, distribution and service industries in Australia, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Mexico, Singapore, Sweden, the UK, the US, and Canada.

Why don’t CFOs have the data they need? Certainly a big part of it is that their organisation’s technology is letting them down. Only 37 per cent of Asia-Pacific (APAC) CFOs felt they had “good visibility” of financial information including: business performance, profitability, sales and labor costs, and sales forecasts. That number fell to just 30 per cent in Australia. More than 80 per cent said that decisions were delayed due to a lack of availability of important information.

Properly selected, deployed and used, integrated technology solutions with enhanced capabilities, social collaboration and mobility are poised to help organisations transform their businesses. These solutions can help an organisation introduce new revenue streams, lower costs, and increase productivity, whatever their business goals may be.

More than one-third of the Australian CFOs surveyed said their financial IT system had very simple or fairly basic functionality and needed updating. Around a third believed that new or more advanced financial systems would deliver the greatest impact on their finance and accounting functions over the next few years.

While there have been significant changes in financial governance requirements and the velocity and volume of data needed to fulfil those requirements, many organisations’ business systems have stayed the same. Some 67 per cent of APAC CFOs and 57 per cent of the Australian CFOs said they still relied on Excel spreadsheets to gain access to and manage data. Old monolithic business systems and processes are ill prepared to deliver the responsiveness that businesses need to succeed in today’s world.

To support improved decision making, modern financial management platforms must provide the following:

1. Single source of the truth: Data consistently stored in one place and accessed independently for financial reporting, operational control, budgeting/planning.
2. Accurate and timely insight: You should be able to run reports at any time and on any device so that decision-makers can gain insight into the current state of the overall business as well as specific areas for concern.
3. Real-time data: Decisions should be based on the most up-to-date real-time information, not traditional spreadsheets that are out of date as soon as they are created.
4. In context analytics: Getting the right information to the right person at the right time, at the pace demanded by the business.
5. Automated decisions: Smart businesses automate the right decisions, so that senior people are not making decisions that could easily be made within business systems.
6. Workflows and alerts: Creating and enforcing unique business processes through workflows and alerts support continuous improvement and increased productivity.
7. Knowledge base of resources: Embedded within today’s financial management systems, social functionality supports a shift in the way organisations collaborate e.g. around a project, a customer incident, a procurement challenge, or the budgeting process.

Having the right system in place that delivers the right data, to the right people at the right time in the right way allows business leaders to confidently take advantage of windows of opportunity and effectively manage their business.

Craig Charlton is senior vice president Asia Pacific for Epicor Software Corporation.

Sign up to Technology Review’s weekly e-newsletter for news and analysis, as well as coverage of the latest products, resources and events. You can also follow Technology Review on Twitter. Send your company news, tip-offs and news on tech resources, products and events to negan@intermedia.com.au.