Jo Fuller, Head of Pre Sales & Product Innovation at Percipient, examines the changing role of finance in today’s increasingly digital world.
We’re all operating in a faster, digital marketplace where business agility is key. In a quest to achieve this crucial enhanced agility, more businesses are turning to digitisation for help. This represents a major change for many organisations, a change that can often redraw traditional departmental boundaries and responsibilities, redefining roles in the process.
Perhaps where this change is most noticeable is with the finance function, with modern finance teams escaping the confines of backward-looking reporting, instead taking on a more proactive, strategic role at the heart of the organisation.
Finance isn’t about number crunching any more. There’s now a real focus on data analytics, so making the most of the information available by interpreting this data and turning it into real, actionable insight. The modern finance team can add increasing levels of value to the business, delivering accurate and precise reports and forecasts rooted in comprehensive, robust insight gathered from right across the business.
Ultimately, businesses now have the ability to exploit their financial data to guarantee the deeper insight required to underpin effective data-driven decision-making that has an overwhelmingly positive impact on performance.
The Digital Advantage
But, key to all this and supporting the evolution of the finance function is the right technology.
Digital-savvy businesses are taking advantage of technology to provide not only the right information but the right tools to turn the massive amounts of data we’re all dealing with into comprehensive, robust business insight.
With the right solutions in place, it’s possible to build a proactive finance function, moving beyond analysing profits and instead really driving organisational purpose.
Increased automation can enable the automatic amalgamation of key financial information from right across the business in real-time. Technology can take care of the data input and processing, tasks that can be both time-consuming and error-prone when carried out manually, freeing-up the finance team to focus on strategic, value-add activities instead.
It’s the application of analytics that then turns this collated information into actionable insight, with the finance team able to spend the time making valuable use of the insight now available.
Comprehensive, Centralised Financial Management
A move away from multiple legacy systems and manual processes, instead opting for a single, centralised system at the heart of the business, enables unified, end-to-end financial management, resulting in tighter control and unfettered access to comprehensive, in-context financial insight at the click of a mouse.
And, the real-time nature of the information means that periodic reporting no longer drives decision-making. Actuals and forecasts can be produced on demand, with traditional accounting cycles becoming increasingly less relevant in-line with the fast-paced nature of doing business today.
What this access to insight does is put concrete facts and accurate predictions at the heart of decision-making, with data-driven decisions, grounded in insight, helping to embed a financial approach to strategy throughout the business.
Instead of basing decisions on what’s already happened, decision-makers can focus on what’s ahead, optimising operations accordingly and planning, with confidence, safe in the knowledge that the information they’re using is timely, accurate and a true reflection of the business in its entirety.
Strategic Finance
The finance function of today is well-positioned to furnish the business with the total visibility required to achieve the levels of agility needed to stay one step ahead of the competition.
With the right tools at their disposal, the finance team can be more strategic than ever before, bridging the gap between reporting and analysis by unlocking the true potential of the swathes of data available to each and every business today.
By replacing slow, manual backward-looking processes with digital capabilities that enable the business to explore and exploit the full potential of its business data, the finance function can lay the groundwork for fast, robust, effective decisions, deriving insight and value from business information and acting as a true catalyst for business success.
Finance Software for Modern Business
If you would like to know more about Percipient or the benefits our software and services could bring to your business, get in touch or call us on 01606 871332.
