For CFOs, Finding and Leveraging Affinities Help Finance Teams Drive Growth

In many ways, CFOs need to view their company’s operations as a forest rather than individual, departmental trees.

This, as companies increasingly look to centralize decision-making processes and streamline their operations in order to provide greater actionable transparency over working capital requirements and other recession-ready needs.

By taking a holistic perspective, finance leaders can better support broad organizational goals at each key touchpoint.

As macroeconomic headwinds blow into the New Year, carrying with them rising interest rates and growing inflationary pressures, an integrated approach to business growth planning is only becoming more important.

Lara Stell, CFO at mPulse Mobile, recently sat down with PYMNTS to talk about how a keen eye for affinities can help better integrate finance teams into business growth planning, as well as the applications of future innovations she sees as key to modernizing finance and accounting operations.

“What’s great about finance and accounting is there’s so much opportunity for improvement due to technology, because much of what we do is very transactional,” she said.

As PYMNTS previously reported, a myriad array of emergent automated solutions are presently revolutionizing the accounting department, while simultaneously helping businesses weather an ongoing accountant shortage.

Innovative digital tools are putting more power in CFOs’ hands by empowering senior finance leaders to better leverage integrated, cross-function data flows that can optimize billing and payment processes, helping shift the impact of the finance department from “doing” to one of “managing.”

2023 Set to Be the Year of the Data-Driven Decision

CFOs who got a head start deploying next-generation solutions to evolve their business processes are hoping to further apply insights gleaned from those digital tools to accelerate smarter future growth in 2023.

“Throughout my tenure,” Stell said — noting that prior to her current role with mPulse Mobile she was with companies that underwent a lot of acquisitions and bolt-ons — “where the opportunity lies is data and data integrity, getting to the root of the information from disparate systems and being able to roll up all the individual data points in order to look at the company holistically.”

It’s a tricky process, she told PYMNTS — but one that’s key to the finance team being able to appropriately support the rest of the business function.

“From the CFO perspective, I don’t want accounting and finance to just check the box, basically just do what we need to do and make sure controls are there, say no to spend requests, etc,” Stell said. “It’s important that we’re really a partner within the business, so that as the finance team gets more mature, we move from transaction processing [with the help of data] to really being an analytical and critical thinker, understanding what everyone is doing and taking appropriate actions to support it.”

Stell added that it’s an ongoing learning process, with both the business at-large and the finance team specifically working to ensure better operational visibility across all verticals.

“I think everyone really understands the importance of being able to see in real time what’s going on,” she said.

Efficiency Key to Easy Operational Wins

Stell told PYMNTS one whitespace area where she sees easy wins with this approach is in replacing and supporting historically manual calculations with automated tools.

“We’re looking primarily to see what we can take off the plate of our team and focus on the strategic items, we want to get much more streamlined,” she said.

“The team would probably spend months on end just to calculate and pay our sales commission on a quarterly basis. But if we implement an automated tool and a centralized system, we can make it much more efficient, which allows us to better partner with the business and think strategically — versus thinking about ‘did I calculate someone’s commission correctly.’”

Key to this approach is the integration of a one-stop platform, something which PYMNTS research shows is resonating more broadly across the healthcare marketplace beyond just mPulse Mobile’s roadmap.

Within the confines of the current macro landscape, and in the face of a looming recession, companies are increasingly looking to modernize their operations and repurpose capital spending toward both internal and customer-facing initiatives that help control costs and drive sustainable efficiency.

What’s the best way to achieve this?

“It’s data and analytics, on a daily basis,” Stell said.