The New CFO: Balancing Financial Skills with Data Science

The role of the CFO is changing drastically and has become increasingly focused on enabling businesses to make the right decisions.

This is according to Jordaan Burger, Vice President Finance for Sage Africa, Middle East and Asia-Pacific, and Jeff Ryan, Managing Director at a leading Sage Business Partner, AWCape.

“The CFO and CTO roles used to be completely separate, but now the CFO is effectively functioning as a CTO too,” said Ryan.

“Today, the CFO role is about understanding how technology can help businesses reach their full potential by reducing costs and optimising profitability.”

Burger added that CFOs have become data custodians and must use all the information available to them to tell stories that inform key decisions.

“Making better-informed decisions has become more complicated because of hybrid working models, which have emphasised the need for businesses to implement versatile, yet robust, technologies,” he said.

Technology a key enabler

Key to this is the implementation of powerful cloud solutions supported by the likes of AWS and Microsoft Azure.

“The cloud has simplified the CFO role significantly because the big cloud players offer cybersecurity and backup capabilities,” said Burger.

Cloud-based solutions also make it easier to access data from a wide range of sources, all of which can be processed more effectively through an automation a solution like Sage Intacct, which enables CFOs to prioritise and generate valuable insights that help them make proactive and more effective decisions.

For example, the General Ledger Outlier in Sage Intacct is a tool that identifies anomalies in your data and notifies you of them. This allows you to rectify data entry errors, such as a recurring payment for R1,000 mistakenly having an extra zero at the end.

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HR collaborating with finance

In their new role as the generators of valuable insights, modern CFOs’ responsibilities extend beyond the balance sheet. They are now tasked with using data to improve operations across the entire business, with HR being one of the most prominent examples.

Sage Intacct uses automation to optimise timesheets, so they don’t need to be built from scratch. Sage Intacct predicts what employees’ timesheets would usually look like, so they only need to make necessary adjustments before continuing their day.

The benefits of tools like timesheets evidently overlap between finance and HR; finance departments use timesheets to ensure appropriate billing, while HR needs them to monitor the employee working conditions.

Therefore, CFOs who leverage the full benefits of Sage Intacct – which provides an extensive range of similar overlapping tools – will help HR departments run smoothly.

Enhance team morale using the latest tech

“The average Sage Intacct implementation provides 250% ROI across the business, improves productivity by up to 70%, and has a net payback period of less than six months,” said Ryan.

“That’s before you even consider the intangible benefits, like a happier workforce that is only focusing on exciting projects rather than mundane tasks.”

Burger agreed: “The workforce morale benefits of using technologies like Sage Intacct are perhaps the most important of all. Employees feel they’re contributing to something meaningful and aren’t bogged down by tedious ‘bean-counting’ tasks.”

This is important as it is not only the role of the CFO that is transforming. Everyone in your finance team is now expected to contribute to the generation of data-driven insights.

“What CFOs are looking for from their finance teams is the marriage of traditional financial skills and the skills of a data scientist,” said Burger. “There’s lots more data than ever before, so financial teams must be able to find the information that truly matters.”

Are your systems talking to one another?

The power of solutions like Sage Intacct is undeniable – from their simplicity to the sheer volume of features that benefit CFOs and their teams.

However, it is also true that there are almost always multiple systems in an environment which must integrate seamlessly into your Sage solution.

This is where AWCape stands tall in the industry, having spent decades working with businesses to integrate solutions like Sage Intacct into other systems.

AWCape is particularly well known for offering unrivalled consulting services and has an extensive list of blue-chip customers to back this up.

AWCape’s depth of experience and dedication to quality products and services will help your business achieve success, underscored by Sage’s industry-defining Intacct solution.

After working with AWCape to implement Sage Intacct, CFOs will gain a holistic view of all their organisation’s financial and HR data, enabling them to generate valuable and unique insights that will benefit their organisations and leapfrog the competition.

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