Leadership
What Keeps CFOs Up At Night? Believe it or Not, Workflow
For better or worse, finance teams are accustomed to doing more with less.
With the global economy booming and business thriving, many executives are being forced to face something they probably never thought they’d have to: A problem hiring and retaining skilled employees.
Recently, CFO Magazine conducted a survey that interviewed 158 senior finance executives about what keeps them up at night. The results weren’t surprising: With increasing pressure from all corners of the company, many leaders’ concerns regarded their teams’ workflow.
Annual audits, tax returns, and quarterly reporting all have separate deadlines, and tracking workflow so you meet them is essential. Plus, the evolving nature of finance means that transparency, accountability, and collaboration across departments are all more important than ever.
A major challenge is keeping everyone updated in real time. This is especially challenging when some team members are remote and others work flexible schedules.
Lacking a dashboard that gives everyone visibility, teams rely on less efficient methods of communication, such as spreadsheets or emails. These two tools are better used as complimentary pieces ran than as a team’s workflow dashboard.
Spreadsheets aren’t always updated in real time, and, let’s face it, Excel is a pretty rotten tool for task management. Emails, on the other hand, are great for correspondence…and that’s about it. They tend to get trapped in inboxes where they’re of no use when someone needs access six months later.
As a result, many finance teams opt for the old standby: The status update meeting. This results in better communication between employees, but less time to act on the new information. According to the survey:
“Senior finance executives need visibility into projects, due dates, and deliverables. But the survey found that lack of such visibility is the third most common issue that prevents finance chiefs from getting a good night’s rest.
Oftentimes, CFOs can’t easily identify potential missed deadlines or bottlenecks in finance’s work processes. This lack of visibility poses risks in accounting, tax, finance, and audit—risks that the required work won’t be done accurately, efficiently, and on time, raising costs and leading to other negative consequences.”
Houston, we have a solution
FloQast was built by accountants for accountants to help them close faster and more accurately. One way we do that is through a collaborative month-end close checklist, which centralizes and organizes all the work for your accounting team.
RevLocal, for example, uses their collaborative close checklist all month long to drive efficiency. The easy-to-use dashboard gives everyone visibility into what tasks have been completed, and who’s responsible for what’s left. Documentation is simple, and Review Notes means conversations that used to be locked in email chains are always available.
