How Automation Will Solve CFO’s No.1 Challenge in 2020

In a Brainyard’s inaugural CFO survey, “State of the CFO Role“, the CFO’s no.1 challenge is “juggling too many responsibilities”.  186 CFO’s admitted that they are engaged with a spreadsheet for about 2.25 hours on average a day. The spreadsheet is time-consuming and still many CFOs had no choice most of the time.

Adobe Inc’s CFO Mr. Mark Garrett says “He is working on cutting Excel out of this process” He also adds that, “I don’t want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us”.

As like Mr. Mark Garrett, most of the CFO’s are aiming to adapt the change to improve accuracy, enhance productivity, unlock the power of data in real-time.

Several CFO’s who couldn’t completely move away from spreadsheets but working onto reduce the dependency on excel like Mr. Maurisse Johnson, CFO of Solutions Journalism Network. He stated, “I’m never going to move completely away from Excel”. “My dependence on Excel has lessened in terms of day-to-day manipulation, but there are instances where two disparate data sources need to be combined.”

Even many CFO’s like Christian Edoria, Director of Finance & Operations for Art in Action still love spreadsheets though willing to adapt transformation to save their time and invest it productively where real-time data can be leveraged to predict and forecast future scenarios more accurately. She says, “I love Excel to death, but I want to be flexible and adaptable to a changing environment – including anything that gets me away from the lines of a spreadsheet”. She also centralizing all her organization's data in NetSuite, where her team can perform allocation tracking real-time, which helped to understand all the costs that go into each art box that’s ship out.

Paul Jacobson, CFO of Delta Airlines says, “we’ve paid down over $10 billion of debt, which has reduced our interest expense by almost a billion dollars a year.”

To aim for growth, a CFO must balance the expenses to reach profitability. You need a more powerful tool that will give you more insights on how you save on costs and turn them into revenue.

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Tags: Finance and accounting, CFO