3 New Approaches for the Data Driven Chief Financial Officer
performance. These are all value-added activities that draw on experience and business
expertise, less so on base data manipulation and validation technical skills.
Conclusion
The way family offices are gaining
deep financial insight is changing.
As an executive, you have a
decision to make about how you
choose to deploy your human
resources and the extent to
which technology enables your
finance department to add more
value across the enterprise. A
fast-close mindset helps because
it heightens the need to maintain
data integrity throughout the
period instead of just once a
month.
Once this real-time mindset is adopted, opportunities for more frequent weekly, daily, or even
on-demand reports and analysis emerge. Real-time reporting is greatly enhanced when the
middleman, a spreadsheet, is eliminated from the equation. Disparate sources of data are
seamlessly aggregated within a strong analytical tool. A tool that can sort, slice, and dice data
to answer the sorts of everyday business
questions that often arise.
Well-designed and implemented dashboards give you the best possible control over financial
processes. Dashboards are user defined, easily tailored, drill-down enabled, and visually direct
attention to the important KPIs of the business.
Are your IT and finance resources buried in ad hoc analysis? Is it a challenge to have strong,
decision-relevant information at your fingertips to manage the business with confidence? Then,
evaluating your own reporting systems is your next step.
