How CFOs can Overcome 4 Common Roadblocks

We all get stuck in a rut sometimes. These days, along with sleep, work, and figuring out what’s for dinner, you might binge-watch something in the hours before bed, before starting the whole process again. Exciting, no?

There’s not too much that’s wrong with this, really. However, a business rut isn’t quite as harmless as a habit of watching several episodes of The Office every night, even though you’ve seen the Jim and Pam romance play out multiple times already.

As a CFO or financial leader, when you’re stuck in a business rut, particularly if it results from having antiquated financial processes, customers may soon start to look elsewhere, resulting in lost opportunities.

What does that rut look like, so you can avoid getting into it?

Roadblocks to Achieving Financial Success

1 Poor processes and inaccurate data

Manual processes are time-consuming. As spreadsheet after spreadsheet piles up, data is scattered in numerous places, leading to inaccurate reporting and continually bringing your monthly (and quarterly, and yearly) close to a crawl. Likewise, revenue recognition processes aren’t completely reliable, nor are your systems for accurately predicting cashflow, allocating costs, understanding your margins, or forecasting sales and revenue. This all disrupts your ability to make critically important business decisions

2 Lack of innovation

Are you innovating at the pace you would like? (Customers likely vote “No.”) Do your existing systems support your service and capabilities goals? If your legacy systems are slowing or preventing your process improvements, it’s time for a change.

3 Missed revenue opportunities

When your data is located in numerous places, you don’t have clear visibility to recognize potential revenue sources. The longer this is true, the more revenue you miss out on.

4 Compliance issues

Difficulties implementing new compliance procedures will only continue to hang over you. Poor record-keeping and not giving proper attention to risk management can have costly repercussions. Who wants to risk that?

Enjoy Financial Benefits with a Frictionless Digital Business

To overcome these common roadblocks, it’s essential you implement a solid digital foundation for frictionless experiences – from commerce to cash. With a fully connected digital ecosystem, you can identify where automation can eliminate redundant processes and pinpoint where operational areas could be better integrated. Processes become faster, you’re able to provide better services for your partners and customers, and you can benefit from immediate and long-term cost savings.

Here’s how strong digital foundations tackle financial roadblocks:

Quality data and reporting

To increase your financial units efficiency and productivity, it all comes back to quality data. With a commerce-to-cash approach, all systems – from sales, supply chain/fulfillment, finance, and service – are seamlessly integrated to create a single source truth and single view data for your organization.

By infusing your financial systems with these innovative data collection practices, you’ll be able to generate accurate reports automatically, with data that’s meaningful and actionable, helping you recognize revenue faster and make confident business decisions. You’re equipped with a dashboard that’s easy to access and share. From here, you can generate real-time reports in an instant, or simply send a link to a pre-made dashboard that acts as a “standing report” for anyone who needs to see current, accurate financial statements.

Freedom to innovate

As technology changes, B2C companies have traditionally been the fastest to adapt and enjoy the benefits. Why be the B2B company that waits? Your partners and customers expect flexible payment options, and having digital agility can help you deliver new and secure ways quickly.

Unlocked revenue

Automation is your friend, speeding up every aspect of your payment and collections processes while drastically reducing errors that naturally occur when performed manually. By connecting all accounts payable and receivable in one system, revenue forecasting is made easy. And integration even becomes lucrative, as you can spot new revenue opportunities you may have previously missed.

Ecommerce organizations need the agility of a young startup, even if they’re a generations-old company. In stable and unpredictable environments, there’s huge value in controlling costs and uptime while launching new revenue streams. —Oracle.com

Automated compliance

We’ve talked before about the freedom of “set it and forget it” automation. When it comes to compliance, you can enjoy the peace of mind that comes with automating processes that support known compliance practices. And, you can automatically keep track of ever-changing regulations across a number of jurisdictions, seriously upping your risk management game.

How to Get Started

At ArganoKeste, we’ve helped organizations of all sizes build the right digital foundations for their businesses and benefit from true unified commerce. If you’d like to see how we can help your organization achieve its goals, contact ArganoKeste today, and we’ll be happy to schedule a time to talk.