Business Analytics for the CFO Function (PowerPoint PPT)

The CFO's finance and accounting function can leverage analytics, especially predictive ones, embedded in their financial reporting, planning, and decision making.

Finance and accounting professional are typically considered to be very quantitative. They are by nature number-crunchers. But collecting, validating, and reporting data is not the same thing as analyzing the information that can be gleaned from data. Most organizations are drowning in data, but starving for information.

The CFO function is experiencing a shift from beyond financial reporting to dealing with and reporting non-financial information. Finance people are increasingly involved with creating and monitoring performance measurements. But do they know how to identify the appropriate measures? Their task should not be about what can be measured but what should be measured. And don't stop there. This is not about just monitoring the dials of a scorecard or dashboard, but moving the dials. The decisions involved to improve performance require analytics of all flavors.

Most companies are far from where they want and need to be when it comes to implementing analytics and are still relying on gut feeling, rather than hard data, when making decisions. Volatility and complexity are the new normal.

When you step back to see a perspective of importance, financial accounting simply deals with valuation ? for example, what is an organization worth if you were to sell it? But managerial accounting is about creating value ? its information contributes to management decisions that financial accounting ultimately deals with afterwards. Arguably managerial accounting is more important than financial accounting. But the issue does not stop there. Analysis must be added to reporting. How else can the sales and marketing functions determine which types of customers are more attractive to retain, to grow, to win-back, and to acquire? And for the attractive types, what is the optimal level of spending for each customer micro-segment to retain, grow, or acquire them?

What is needed today is the seamless integration of managerial methods such as balanced scorecards, strategy maps, capacity-sensitive driver-based budgets and rolling financial forecasts, and measuring and managing channel and customer profitability (using activity-based costing principles). Each one can be amplified by embedding business analytics with them. The methods are collectively intended to align manager and employee behavior and limited resources to focus on the organization's strategic priorities and objectives and better decision making.