CFOs Struggling To Look Ahead, Finds Workiva

B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm Workiva released new data this week that highlights financial executives’ struggle to forecast.

Reports Monday (April 17) said the company’s latest report found forecasting to be a top area in which financial professionals feel they could improve, with nearly a quarter of survey respondents highlighting this area of focus. It was second only to monthly reporting, in which 39 percent of respondents said they feel they could improve.

Cash flow management and monthly financial close management also saw more than a tenth of financial professionals surveyed single out these areas, Workiva found.

Despite CFOs and other financial executives admitting that there is room for improvement in their operations, investment in technologies that could enable those improvements is not a priority.

Nearly half of survey respondents (47 percent) said they have no budget for new tools like accounting, finance or reporting software this year. More than a fifth said they do have a budget, but it’s under $25,000. Just 5 percent said they have allocated between $76,000 and $200,000 for investments in these areas.

Workiva also noted that the majority (62 percent) said they aren’t using cloud-based accounting solutions whatsoever.

Reports noted that, in addition to areas like forecasting and reporting, there are other aspects of the corporate finance world that could gain significant improvement by investing in cloud-based technologies. For instance, Workiva found, 41 percent of financial professionals said manual data entry takes the longest time for employees when it comes to non-value activity. More than a third said data collection and aggregation was their biggest time waster.