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Confessions of a CFO - The Top Concerns of Today's Senior Finance Leaders
Where did it say “sleepless nights” in your job description?
You know it all too well. But, if you’re like many, you hesitate to admit the reality: It just isn’t easy being a CFO. Your company relies on you for financial leadership, but as your organization grows, so do the challenges—faster closes, cleaner audits, smarter revenue management, deeper analyses, regulatory compliance, multinational consolidations... Add it up, and the headaches and sleepless nights are almost inescapable.
If outdated or constrained financial software infrastructure has held you back, there’s a better way. Intacct offers powerful, flexible, best-in-class financial management solutions that are transforming the way small and medium-sized companies increase efficiency, drive growth, and plan for the future. In other words, Intacct helps CFOs make a difference.
In the following article, you’ll read about the secret truths that CFOs are loath to admit—the things that keep them up at night. More important, however, is how Intacct can help you respond to these challenges.
1. “I’m afraid to admit just how much we rely on spreadsheets to run our business.”
Spreadsheets. They’re the easy, reliable, multipurpose tool that every finance pro knows how to use. But, while you may have been forced to rely on spreadsheets to get up and running quickly, they won’t suffice as your business grows. The fact is, too many businesses take unnecessary risks by relying on fragile, unsecure, single-user spreadsheets for complex tasks like revenue management or multi-entity consolidation. The impact: lost productivity, questionable accuracy, and lengthy stares from your auditors.
The solution: Operational efficiency
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2. “Accurate and timely management reporting sometimes seems impossible.”
Any financial system can churn out the basic financial statements. But your peers in the boardroom want much more. They want accurate, timely, and detailed analyses that go far deeper for real insight into what’s driving business performance. For too many CFOs, that means relying on staff to extract data from multiple sources in multiple formats and data definitions. What’s more, creating manual calculations and summaries after the data is collected requires additional time and effort. By the time you’ve got it all together— and burned days of staff time—the reports are out of date, the questions have changed, and the frustrations have begun anew.
The solution: In-depth insights, on demand
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3. “Our consolidations are labor-intensive, timeconsuming, and error-prone.”
When a growing company has multiple entities, tax IDs, and currencies, it’s often a painfully slow process to bring all financial information into a unified, cohesive view. Manually collecting spreadsheets, checking formulas, converting currencies, performing intercompany eliminations— it all adds up to a frustrating, lengthy closing cycle. And as your company grows, the challenge becomes exponentially greater. Must timely financial consolidations always require superpowers?
The solution: Quick consolidations and fast closings
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4. “We fail to bill 100 percent of our time and expenses.”
It doesn’t take a financial expert to recognize that manual methods for tracking time and expenses are a major contributor to revenue leakage—the often-invisible profit killer. When your employees are in the field working alongside clients around the world, spreadsheets or jotted notes on receipts won’t capture all project-related expenses. It’s too easy to overlook or forget the crucial process of recording labor hours, noting all employee expenses, and tracking project-related purchases. The result: massive amounts of nonbillable time and unrecoverable expenses that impact your bottom line.
The solution: Accurate billing, faster invoices
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5. “Our on-premises accounting system doesn’t give us the business agility we need.”
No two businesses are alike—so there’s no reason to endure the outdated one-size-fits-all approach to financial software. With on-premises software, you’re trapped by major capital investments, lengthy implementations, difficult configurations, expensive customizations, and a significant maintenance and support burden. Instead, your organization requires the agility to adapt to business fluctuations without waiting months for IT to make changes. You need to keep pace with changing reporting requirements. And you want a system that’s tailored to your unique workflows and business processes.
The solution: Bringing finance to the cloud
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6. “Our finance system doesn’t talk to our other key applications.”
Top-performing businesses know: You can’t operate efficiently unless everyone can share data easily. No silos. No walls. No barriers. You need easy, real-time access to information from sales, manufacturing, payroll, budgeting, marketing, and other areas to accurately manage the entire corporate financial picture. But when you’re bogged down with cumbersome data extracts and manual rekeying, business agility suffers. How can you tap into the power of other best-in-class applications and avoid the mediocrity of suite lock-in?
The solution: Out-of-the-box integration
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How can we help? Please let us know how we can support you or your business?
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