CFO analytics requires data management and operational expertise

Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are taking on more responsibility as their job and that of the finance function expands and evolves. Finance leaders, particularly the CFO, are expected to deliver actionable insights that shape strategic decision-making, drive profitability and strengthen competitive advantage. To meet these demands, CFO analytics must encompass data management and a deep understanding of operational and financial management.

It’s about how to use rich data sets to align the whole business, improve budgeting and help everyone retain customers. CFOs and the finance team need to be well-equipped to take on the data analytics challenge within your business.

Finance is the right team to manage company-wide data

The finance team already plays a critical role in maintaining the integrity of financial data. They are seasoned in handling sensitive information, managing regulatory compliance and ensuring the accuracy of month-end close. Because finance teams collaborate with virtually every department during budgeting, forecasting, and financial planning, they possess a unique cross-functional perspective.

This cross-functional visibility makes the finance team ideally suited to take on a broader role in data management and automation. Unlike other departments that focus specifically on operational or departmental outcomes, finance is responsible for seeing the big picture—linking operational inputs with financial outputs, monitoring cash flow, and supporting business decisions with advanced analytics.

What distinguishes the most successful CFO is whether they choose to be a data champion for the entire business rather than just the finance team. CFOs who see the value in creating analytics capabilities across the whole business are using business intelligence and financial planning and analysis platforms to combine and review financial and operational information from ERPs and many different data sources.

Disparate data is growing, and finance must lead

Businesses are generating more real-time data than ever before from ERP systems, excel spreadsheets and CRM interactions to third-party sources such as sell through data. This data explosion is both a challenge and an opportunity.

Disparate systems often produce fragmented or inconsistent data that can hinder decision-making if not properly governed. Without a clear data strategy, finance teams can’t rely on this big data for analytics solutions, nor can they enable the business to overlay artificial intelligence for ongoing digital transformation in FP&A.

Finance leaders must rise to this challenge. They are uniquely placed to assess the value of incoming and internally generated data and determine which data sets contribute to financial performance, strategic planning and operational efficiency. As data flows become more complex, data management becomes not just a technical task but a business imperative.

Making the financial and non-financial results visible

The ability to access a centralized view of multiple data sources may seem complicated but can be achieved via a BI and FP&A platform like Phocas. Phocas is an efficient solution for the visualization of holistic results or for those relevant to a department or product in real-time and is a clear way of sharing cross functional metrics.

Sales reps can quickly view their sales figures and targets, as well as customer information. Managers can see at a glance how their department is performing against forecasts or drill down into the underlying data that sits behind the dashboard. This gives everyone the chance to learn more about your company’s financials and the bottom line.

A big opportunity for the finance function is how they help everyone gain a basic understanding of financial reporting to empower and make them more aware of overall performance. What this does is help the whole organization improve their financial skills and positively impact inventory optimization, supply chain management and demand forecasting.

The merging of all functions with data driven-insights and a basic background in finance can improve the quality of decisions everyone makes in the organization.

CFOs that can offer easy-to-use analytics and reporting tools to people in any area of the business, whether at the executive level or business unit level, give their companies a distinct competitive advantage. Employees are confronted with dozens of questions every day and data-driven insights provide the information they need to make the best decisions. As more companies adapt to a data-driven culture, they come to recognize that the guidance of kpis based on historical data is vital to their risk management and continued success.