Become Your Company’s Chief Future Officer

Why CFOs must be able to predict their companies’ future and how they can do it

‍Proformative.com, a premier website for accounting and finance professionals recently announced their annual CFO Dimension conference to be held this year in New York City on the 19th and 20th of October, 2015. This year’s conference theme is “The CFO as Chief Future OfficerTM – Driving strategy, Leadership and Innovation”. This year, 300 senior level finance, accounting and treasury professionals are expected to attend.

The Evolving Role of the CFO

As we’ve seen in several of the blog entries on this site, the CFO’s position and responsibilities have evolved in recent years. The perceived association of their role with just the accounting and finance functions is simply not true anymore. In the blog entry titled “CFO’s Big Picture,” I discuss how the CFO role evolved from a “chief accountant” to a more strategic role, relying on high-quality, timely, and accurate data to help navigate the company.

Expanded Responsibilities

The post “The CFO's Revised Job Description” suggests that CFOs must now oversee areas such as IT, Legal, and Operations, in addition to Finance, Accounting, Reporting, and Compliance. And finally, “Why CFOs Need to Adopt Financial Analytics” discusses the important practice and discipline of engaging in routine analysis of operations and financial data, both actual and forecasted. CFOs are expected to understand operational and financial results and the underlying reasons for any unexpected results or deviations from budgets or forecasts.

The Changing Landscape

As many of us can clearly see and actually experience in our daily jobs, the CFO position, even in smaller companies, is not the same as it was only a few years ago. This is partly due to the realignment of the company’s upper management’s duties and responsibilities, but can also be attributed to a range of technology products aimed at solving the problems and challenges that most organizations face on a daily basis, mostly in long-term strategic planning as well as financial and operational planning.

Recommended Software Solutions

For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), I highly recommend a suite of software products published by Centage Corporation: Centage. I have been a long-time user of these products and went through the various version changes and upgrades over the years. I always felt comfortable that this product line had two simple and well-focused purposes:

1. Empower Management: To empower company management with the ability to see, understand, and make informed and timely decisions that will affect the future performance of their organizations.
2. Enable Planning and Analysis: To enable the planning, budgeting, and analysis activities by offering a software solution that, through built-in business rules and a user formula-free process, can automatically generate a complete and accurate budget.

The Benefits of Advanced Planning Tools

The software presents future expected results via a set of future period financial statements and other reports while monitoring past performance through direct access to actual accounting data, formatted and ready to display in any desired manner. The ability to access actual data as soon as accounting periods are closed and immediately compare it with “future” versions of this data (i.e., budget data) has a profound impact on how the CFO and other members of the management team can move to make decisions with a level of confidence never before possible.

Moving Beyond Intuition

CFOs and CEOs can finally run their organizations based on more facts and less intuition or guesswork. Major mistakes can be avoided or at least minimized, and risks mitigated. With tools such as Centage with Analytics, you too can become the “Chief Future Officer” in your organization.

In summary, the evolving role of the CFO requires them to predict their company's future accurately and make strategic decisions based on reliable data. By leveraging advanced planning and budgeting software, CFOs can enhance their ability to forecast, analyze, and adapt, driving their companies toward sustained success.

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