Finance agility: Key elements for every modern finance leader’s toolkit

By Mike Beach, Chief Financial Officer, Chargebee

Mike Beach, Chief Financial Officer, Chargebee

Pervasive changes in technology and IT, evolving consumer behaviours and the rising adoption of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model have all profoundly changed the role of the CFO and the wider finance department. With data dictating companies’ every move, finance leaders can no longer afford for their teams to be bogged down with manual data entry tasks or chasing other departments for vital customer information.

The agility organisations need to succeed doesn’t just come from a faster way of working. It also depends on how well the finance team – and the business as a whole – can maximise the opportunities offered by a holistic, more intelligent data strategy. With the right toolkit, finance leaders can lay the foundation for future growth, providing a sound regulatory and reporting framework, as well as the data management, automation and flexibility to scale.

Crucially, the technology stack must address two main processes – how data gets to the finance team (automation), and then how the finance team uses this data to make well-informed decisions, both for long-term strategy as well as near-term growth (forecasting and analysis).

Automation

According to McKinsey, 40 percent of financial activity, such as revenue management, can already be automated to streamline internal processes and improve overall business performance. There are five key areas where automation can deliver tangible benefits for finance teams from day one:

1. Accounting – automation is the answer to subscription businesses’ woes of handling mid-cycle changes such as cancellations, pauses, upgrades and downgrades
2. Payroll – removing the human error-factor from key operations designed to uphold regulatory compliance and ensure regular pay-out for the employees
3. Customer payment processing – offering multiple payment support and multi-currency support can reduce buyer friction at the point of sale and help organisations expand into new markets
4. Customer relationship management (CRM) – finance teams need a single source of truth when it comes to customers, and automated data syncs between sales and finance software play a crucial role in helping them connect with this customer data directly, in a self-serve way. Linking CRM data with revenue intelligence operations this way not only improves workflows by dismantling information silos, it can also expedite the introduction of new product lines or pricing, indicated by various patterns in customer behaviour
5. Billing intelligence – beyond automating invoice creation to issuing refunds, billing intelligence helps manage the lifecycle of the business and even prevent churn, by spotting customer pain points in the data and automatically alerting relevant teams to take action before the customer is out the door for good
   

Once organisations have enabled the finance department with a holistic view of all relevant and accurate customer data – without having to manually manage tedious processes – they will have the confidence and agility to make critical business decisions. How they use this springboard will determine their success in carving out a competitive advantage in their markets.

Forecasting and analysis

With up-to-date, reliable data at the ready, finance leaders can easily elevate the quality and speed of their reporting, analysis and forecasting. Whether they are delivering the latest insights for a board meeting or audit, experimenting with different pricing strategies or tweaking financial forecasts, the technologies that can help finance leaders see the big picture can be broken down into two categories.

Firstly, data visualisation helps tell a coherent story from the data without requiring intricate technical know-how. A crucial component to this is having Business Intelligence tools in place to pull data from various corners of the organisation – including internal as well as external sources – and provide user-friendly reports tailored to specific audiences, such as finance. Crucially, the resulting reports and dashboards empower finance teams to interrogate the data themselves, find new connections within it and act on the insights gleaned.

Secondly, modern cloud-based ERP systems are powerhouses for financial data storage. These tools can handle large amounts of data and when properly integrated with a billing system, can provide real-time analysis capabilities. For example, by analysing data from billing systems combined with ERP tools such as Microsoft Dynamics GP, the finance team can effortlessly identify more upsell and cross-sell opportunities with a contextual view of invoices, subscriptions and accounts.

Comprehensive tech stacks are a finance leader’s best friend

Today, with technology elevating all aspects of business, finance leaders have a responsibility to leverage the tools available to them in order to expand to more strategic and data-driven activities. By automating burdensome manual processes, digitising key parts of the workflow and maximising the advantages offered by integrated analytics, they can give their teams the boost they need to work more efficiently, add value where it really matters and make better-informed decisions.