What Every CFO Should Know About Digitization💡

The days of getting by as a finance professional with Excel as your only software resource are over — the age of digital transformation is here, and it’s not ending anytime soon. While Excel is still critical and serves as table stakes for finance companies, new tools extend its capabilities and can create optimized efficiency for your team. 

CFOs face a choice: fall behind or forge ahead in the digital space to improve their team's workflow and meet customer and business expectations. Keeping pace with the times is no longer a nice-to-have; to thrive instead of survive, it’s a requirement. 

The CFO Show’s latest guest, VP at Marcum Technology Stacy Brown, walked through her best practices for a digital transformation that supports and enhances workflows without causing overwhelm or burnout.

Read on for Stacy’s best practices to earn an edge in digitization in the finance world.

5 Key Steps in Your Digital Transformation Journey

What is the main goal of digitization? The answer may vary from organization to organization, but at the core, it should be to improve system efficiency, increase ROI, and deliver a world-class customer experience.

If the changes you’re making undermine those three KPIs instead of supporting them, it’s not the right change.

The best way to understand what’s missing in a workflow? Asking your team — the ones in the weeds of daily operations — and listening to what they have to say. Tech adoption with no team buy-in is a recipe for disaster.  

Beyond the groundwork of listening to your team, Stacy says it’s also important to understand the bones of your current system before implementing a shiny new tool.

Ensuring you have a strong foundation for digitization saves you from the common pitfall of doing too much, too fast. 

There are a few main areas to focus on upfront: accounting, close management, FP&A, RPA, and BI. 

How to Overcome Tech Overwhelm as a Team

To avoid burning out and risking a failed implementation, you must consider the basis of a successful adoption: team buy-in and use-case clarity.

Both play a crucial role. If a team doesn’t know why a piece of software was implemented, it won’t get used to its fullest potential, and if a tool isn't understood, it becomes a burden rather than an asset. Educating your team is the jumping-off point of avoiding overwhelm, alongside:

Assessing what you already have. What type of expertise is on your team? Determining the level of know-how at your fingertips can help rule out some tools and highlight the need for others. This type of audit helps side-step the stress of new technology.

Examining Close Management and FP&A efforts. What part of these areas needs attention? What parts are working well? Do you know the makers of success for these departments? Answering those questions can help narrow down your choices. 

Consolidating software functions whenever possible. What areas of focus can share a solution? Odds are, you will not need a separate tech solution for each area of focus across your organization — there is no need to add undue complexity where simplicity thrives.

Starting to feel more confident about embarking on your digital transformation journey? Whether that’s a yes or a no, the latest episode of The CFO Show is for you. Stacy shares even more actionable insights around tech adoption and more, available wherever you get your podcasts.

In case you missed it…

Discover how, as a CFO, you can drive growth in your organization, demonstrate exceptional leadership and effectively communicate with investors through this conversation with Vinny Prajka. In his role at JMI Equity, he helps portfolio companies find the best CFOs to accelerate their growth while performing at the top of their game.

What’s next…

Learn how to nurture a strong partnership between the Office of Finance and revenue operations by fostering not just rapport, but strategic alignment. As a CFO, forming a strong partnership with the CRO can lead to better business outcomes and smooth over common points of friction. In this episode, Puneet Arora, President at Yellow.ai, walks through why it’s important for these two roles to support one another, based on his 25 years of experience working alongside CFOs and his background as a CRO.