How Financial Leaders Can Build Sustained Business Flexibility, Resilience, And Agility
As a financial leader, driving business growth and staying financially competitive demands transparency around what’s happening in your business.
When change happens, this transparency gives you the resilience, flexibility, and agility you need to respond quickly—whether to adversity or opportunity.
With the right technology for your organization, you can gain the real-time insights you need to inspire and drive smarter business decisions, engage your employees, improve productivity and stay competitive.
Resilience
In the face of disruption and adversity, why do some companies fail while others adapt, innovate, and even thrive? The answer is resilience—the ability to endure and recover from a crisis and to bounce back, sometimes even stronger than before.
Building organizational resilience is integral to your company’s ability to gain a competitive edge when unforeseen change happens internally or externally. It not only ensures you can maintain your company’s financial, digital, and technological operations in the event of a crisis— it enables you to protect yourself against those threats in the first place.
The right financial management technology equips forward-thinking financial leaders to deal with change. Digital transformation provides the tools they need to access their data in real-time, collaborate with ease, and make the dynamic decisions that can avoid costly delays. Such businesses are more likely to cope with whatever lies ahead and have the tools and skills to adapt to and recover from adversity.
Resilient businesses overcome obstacles and uncertainties at speed and, in the process of flexing and adapting to their changing circumstances, may even emerge with newfound capabilities. In some cases, the experience of facing adversity can see organizations accelerate their operations, streamline their processes, and leave the competition behind.
Consider those companies that adapted their business models to meet their customers’ needs—like Netflix adding a streaming service to its DVD rental business, IBM pivoting from PC production to IT consulting services and Android’s move away from its origins as a cloud-based photo-storage platform into the mobile phone and device market.
Agility
As in life, change is a constant in business. Geopolitical unrest, the market decline, the talent drain, and the increasing evidence of climate change reveal a growing need for organizations to be flexible and agile—adapting quickly to the unknown and unplanned.
Adaptability and agility can be great predictors of performance and potential. An agile approach in the workplace starts with a mindset and sees agile leaders going with the flow of inevitable change rather than working against it.
As finance leaders become more future[1]facing—not just forecasting but making decisions on which the future of the business rests—they can begin to appreciate a new stakeholder: the customer.
Companies rise and fall on their customers. To make forward-looking decisions, CFOs must understand the customer as intricately as every other part of the operation.
Customers define what the company should ultimately offer. But their expectations also set the service specification and the digital agenda—the crucial investments finance leaders will make in the coming years.
For CFOs, agile working can ensure your workforce is productive and performs at its best to meet customer expectations and drive business growth, even when facing rapid change.
To meet your customers’ growing wants, needs, and expectations can mean providing best-in[1]class customer service, 24/7 availability, and social channels that can always answer the next question, meet the next need, or solve the next problem.
Adopting more agile and flexible ways of working across your organization can make you a more resilient business that can react to market, business, or economic changes quickly and confidently.
Adopting a cloud-native approach to your financial management and back-office systems can improve your agility, cut operating costs, and help increase revenue. With the right technology, your business can lead the way and innovate and scale more quickly, maximizing flexibility for changing conditions and gaining a vital business edge.
“Organizations need to be designed explicitly for regular realignment to new markets, products, services, and objectives.”
Tom Cheesewright, Applied Futurist, High Frequency Chang
The evolving role of leadership
The role of the CFO is changing, from the need to put out fires throughout the business to the ability to make data-driven decisions. It’s your job to strategize and rationalize every part of the organization.
As information becomes a key currency of operations and technology more pervasive, the role of the CFO now includes taking additional responsibilities for IT—owning tech investments, data processes, the deployment of automation technologies, and even information security.
For financial leaders, adapting to change while helping people align their collective direction is fast becoming an essential skill. Forward-looking CFOs and finance executives need to find time to work on strategic initiatives so they can grow and drive their businesses.
The right technology can deliver automation and controls around billing, accounting, and reporting that forward-looking financial leaders need to reduce errors, stay audit[1]ready, and scale. At the same time, the ability to access integrated management and financial insights across business entities—in minutes, not days—can put leaders in a position to make dynamic decisions and drive growth.
A modern cloud-based platform addresses the many challenges financial executives face, like the loss of productivity due to time[1]consuming manual processes that aggregate data from multiple systems and audit preparations.
“Leaders see room for improvement in nearly every phase of their financial processes. Priority number one is improving efficiency and reducing costs.”
—Foundry MarketPulse Survey, January 2023.
Financial leaders who join their peers in shifting operations to the cloud can gain a significant opportunity to improve their processes.
By embracing agility, CFOs can foster a culture of continuous learning and adaptation that will enable them and their organizations to thrive in periods of disruption.
“The most successful companies are driving their move to the cloud with a mix of finance, procurement and HR, as well as operations and supply chain.”
EY (Consulting
Financial leaders who balance values and innovation can successfully navigate change to stay ahead of the curve, achieve their ambitions, and thrive in today’s dynamic business landscape.
And with the insights and visibility that power better decision-making, they can meet their business needs today, gain the edge over the competition—and lead their business into the future.
By integrating applications and data on a cloud-native platform, today’s forward[1]thinking CFOs can use technology and automation to gain real-time insights into their operations and stay ahead of the curve.
Great CFOs succeed by leveraging technology and, more importantly, the data insights to be gained for the good of the business.
The increasing importance of company culture
A happy and empowered workforce is a productive workforce that, as a team, can drive business growth.
The Foundry MarketPulse survey, which surveyed 408 US. financial and accounting leaders at small and midsized businesses, painted a picture of busy finance teams frustrated by time-consuming manual processes.
For example, 81% said the time spent on accounting, compliance, and financial close inhibited their work on strategic projects.
Taking steps to modernize accounting management systems can help businesses of all sizes overcome legacy challenges and gain insights to help their employees improve productivity, reduce costs, and prepare for rapid growth and innovation.
Adopting innovative, best-in-class cloud solutions can automate manual tasks across a business and free people to focus on areas that contribute to business growth. It can also increase engagement and nurture a happy and dynamic workplace culture.
With the right technology, employees across company departments can analyze data and examine their processes and business results, using analytics to model potential changes and drive better, more dynamic decisions.
Automated reporting can boost productivity and worker satisfaction and enable employees’ speed, agility, and capacity to incorporate financial innovation into business operations—enhancing and enriching the workplace culture for all.
Why technology is the fast track to staying ahead
To be in business today—no matter your sector—is to operate in a competitive landscape where unforeseen challenges are inevitable. To survive demands you have access to real-time data.
Moving forward, looking ahead, and staying alert to market conditions, industry trends, and new technologies enables financial leaders to cultivate the growth mindset needed to adapt to changing circumstances and seize new opportunities.
Today’s finance leaders can fuel growth and accelerate revenue with the right technology, integrated best-in-class solutions, and connected finance and sales functions to meet their business needs.
Only with the right technologies can CFOs get datapoints from across the operation and make useful decisions with it—or indeed have decisions from elsewhere fed back into the operation in real-time. And only with the right technologies can they save time, cut the length and cost of processes, and prepare for the next wave of innovation (AI), which will change the shape of business yet again.
Why modern finance is the key to your success
With Sage Intacct’s core financials, your business can save time by automating manual processes and eliminating inefficient workflows.
Reduce your close time, accelerate your finance team’s productivity, and get the insights you need in seconds to address complex issues and quickly respond to market changes. Sage Intacct dashboards take the strain out of reporting and forecasting.
You can slice and dice the details that matter to all key stakeholders—investors, executives, sales, finance, and other departments—improving your business agility and empowering you to make impactful strategic and data-driven decisions.
And with Sage Intacct, the integrity of your company data is protected and secured against potential cyberattacks.
Keep your organization agile with an open and configurable cloud accounting solution that lets you share data and connect multiple solutions, including Salesforce.
Your entire organization can leverage intuitive systems that global teams can learn to navigate with ease.
Industry-leading cloud finance software built for growing businesses
Sage Intacct is the cloud solution trusted to automatically manage revenue complexities at speed. With automated workflows, intelligent revenue recognition, and seamless data flows, Sage Intacct streamlines the revenue cycle across your organization.
And with additional flexible modules for total financial management, you’re always ready for what’s next.
Agility, flexibility—and resilience
Designed to meet the biggest challenges faced by your finance team, Sage Intacct gets the fundamentals right. Reduces the admin and manual processes involved in running your business and frees you and your team to focus on driving growth.
Keeping you ahead of the curve
Sage Intacct allows CFOs to make real-time, strategic decisions based on accurate predictions, data, and insights. Gain the visibility you need to achieve your ambitions and build your business for the future.
