What are the top priorities for CFOs and finance leaders in 2023? Find out in this blog series! Each week, we’ll explore a new topic that’ll help you tackle the year head-on.

Priority #2: Make bold decisions

Are your good intentions at risk of holding your organization back? With rising inflation and many performance indicators flashing red, it’s tempting to tighten the reins on spending, postpone certain initiatives, and scale back on growth plans. While this cautious mindset is understandable, for many organizations these cutbacks can actually create more of a problem.

Right now, leaders in every industry are making strategic choices and creating initiatives that aim to keep their businesses competitive. To survive and thrive in today’s continuously disrupted market, business decisions need to be bold. But bold decisions made on hunches don’t cut it. Bold decisions need to be smart, rapid, and fully informed.

Here, we circle back to spending cuts that create issues, and in particular, software investment. This is often one of the first areas in line to be deprioritized when the bottom line is at risk. In fact, it is at these times that it should be receiving some of the greatest attention – especially when the resulting software empowers the organization to navigate market turbulence more effectively.

This year, with disruption showing no sign of abating, digitization, standardization, and automation will be critical as businesses focus on solving problems for their customers in innovative, lasting ways. It is here that technology investment is key, acting as the enabler for greater efficiency and visibility enterprise-wide. Thankfully, many organizations have already got the message. According to Gartner, “Macroeconomic uncertainty and ongoing disruptions are continuing to drive financial planning and analysis (FP&A) leaders to accelerate technology adoption.”

In the context of FP&A, digital transformation through the right technology enables finance leaders to plan smarter and react faster. Traditional barriers between finance and operations can be broken down to fully align strategic, financial, and operational plans enterprise-wide. Having the right numbers (and the whole picture) to hand at all times opens the door for scenario modeling, allowing finance teams to rapidly simulate the impact of different strategies and market conditions. The result is a finance function that can plan in near real-time and steer the organization on the right path during all manner of macro- and micro-environmental challenges. As Gartner succinctly puts it, “making FP&A more predictive and agile will make finance a better strategic partner to the business.”

In 2023, invest in tools to support bold decision-making, setting your business up for success.

Check out the other blogs in this series:

• 2023 Finance Priority #1: Navigate through disruption
• 2023 Finance Priority #3: Enable growth
• 2023 Finance Priority #4: Adopt smarter ways of working
• 2023 Finance Priority #5: Look for talent beyond finance & accounting