The Changing Role of The CFO

Thoughts on the new understanding of the role of the CFO

Although CFOs at small and midsize organizations still retain their core financial planning and analytical responsibilities, they are increasingly taking on responsibility for a larger number of organization wide activities. CFOs are also responsible for IT, risk management, audit, and compliance, as well as working alongside the CEO on sales, HR, and legal activities. The focus is on a partnership between the CFO and CEO to manage rapid growth by running the business as a team.

In addition to being responsible for finance, legal and IT, CFOs are also involved in the strategy and success of the company's product and service roadmap and in the operations restructuring. There should also be no customer offer without the input of a financial professional. Cost management and margin optimization are among the new CFO activities. CFO is an overall business role, but with a major in finance. 
 
Growing small and midsize manufacturing, service, distribution, and asset-intensive companies with complex requirements are seeking rapid, low-cost IT implementations. On the provider side, the CFO’s role is to help clients make the best use of IT related and organizational products and services (solutions) and to ensure the implementation teams achieve the client’s vision. The same on the customer side, the CFO should not be underestimated as a contact person for decisions. CFOs tend to be more hands-on when it comes to making IT decisions and providing IT solutions. They want IT investments to enable high-impact strategies that can save cash, increase margins, mitigate, and reduce risk, improve customer service, and drive down the cost of goods sold, or services rendered. CFOs are not interested in looking back, they are only interested in forward-looking tools that provide clear insight into profitability by customer and product. They expect their IT investments to support faster, better decision-making processes that will guide the way to the most profitable and low-risk growth opportunities.
 
The numbers tell the story. The business and the people can be managed more effectively with reliable information. In every organization, no matter its size, results hinge on the decisions made every day by managers and executives. When these decisions are based on gut instinct, rather than genuine business insight, the results can be difficult to predict. The key to driving performance across growing business is the ability to get accurate information in real time.

Ongoing economic uncertainty has changed forever the way executives look at the value of business intelligence (BI). CFOs at growing companies cannot wait years to see a return on their IT investments. It’s necessary to have BI and analytics as running tools even in the initial phase of implementing an ERP so that The CFO can immediately start assessing the return on their IT investments and use those returns to fund subsequent phases of their long-term IT plan.