Digital tools CFOs must know.
What tools and skills are necessary to lead the digital transformation as a CFO?
CFOs (Chief Financial Officers) have a tremendous responsibility within their role. They must manage the overall finances of their company, including financial planning and goal setting, and also manage financial risks and any associated financial record keeping and reporting. They also often work as a partner so the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) and COO (Chief Operating Officer) to help strategize and plan for budgets, forecasting, and other business.
One modern responsibility of CFOs is to understand what digital tools can help them transform and grow their business. Working in partnership with other C-suite level leadership as well as the financial and accounting teams they oversee, CFOs know that embracing digitalization in finance helps a business to stay agile and will help promote growth business-wide. Here are some things the best CFOs understand about digital transformation and the finance function.
Understanding the Benefits
Change can be scary and difficult for any business. It requires a massive amount of preparation and also usually a significant financial investment. For a CFO, digital transformation is understood to be financially beneficial to a business in a number of ways. Digital finance changes can help businesses stay competitive in their industry (ensuring against lost revenue to competitors) and also means utilizing better technology that can increase economic benefits (like cost savings from utilizing automation software and technology for certain areas).
Hiring for Skills
Since CFOs are overseeing teams of finance employees, it’s important that they are hiring people with the right mindset towards progress, technology, and growth. CFOs interested in digital transformation know that to truly drive digital finance transformation, it’s more than just plugging in the newest software. Digital transformation means having the right people with solid skill sets on board to help facilitate change, support strategy, suggest solutions, troubleshoot, and more. In addition to hard tech skills and solid digital experience, finance and information technology teams should have a curiosity about products and people, leadership and decision-making skills, as well as an elevated level of engagement with their work and their team.
Hiring is another way that digital transformation leads to growth – adding more staff help handle changes. Most leaders would agree that a business that is able to hire is a healthy and growing business.
Partnering with the Right Products
There are some specific areas that finance can specifically benefit from digital technologies. Here are some things CFOs should consider as they look at ways to bring about meaningful change and maximize growth.
- Analytics:
Advanced analytics can lead to better reporting, a real asset in fiscal management, goal setting, projection, and more. - Cloud computing:
Cloud computing offers several benefits that help a business become more flexible, including secure off-site storage, which can be a benefit to finance companies with confidential information and vast amounts of data. - Blockchain:
Blockchain, a decentralized ledger technology, continues to offer several benefits to different industries because of its accessible and transparent nature.
The finance digital transformation will no doubt drive change and growth for all areas of businesses. Having the right leadership in charge of these changes and the right team to support transformation can ensure more successful adoption and implementation of the tools that will help drive growth.
