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.

As a finance leader, navigating today’s complex, constantly changing environment is challenging in itself. Compounding this issue is rising pressure to deliver timely insights to senior executives that drive better decisions and higher enterprise value. The problem is, how do you achieve this with a team that is already over-stretched? Certainly not by driving your colleagues to burnout.

In reality, the only way to meet this demand for knowledge, while maintaining performance enterprise-wide, is to move toward a new operating model. The ability to adjust work quickly and dynamically, do more with the same resources, and face the most pressing requirements of the organization head-on are all vital changes that will help you to tackle the demands placed on you and your team. Four out of the top five CFO priorities identified in recent Gartner research relate to remodeling how the finance function supports the business, so this topic is certainly front-of-mind for many of your peers.

Redefining the finance operating model requires the introduction of smarter ways of working coupled with a tighter, data-driven approach to planning, enhanced automation, and integration. The ideal scenario is one that:

• Enables planning by exception: Enterprises spend too much time planning at a time when data is rapidly expanding, and decisions need to be made faster. Planning shouldn’t happen on a rigid calendar but instead, react with agility to threats that cause disruption and opportunities that generate value.
• Ensures management by metrics: Organizations can move faster when decisions are delegated, but performance must be managed in sync with organizational objectives.
• Focuses on value levers: When organizations concentrate on the levers that drive value creation, they can devise, communicate, and prioritize strategies that deliver impact.
• Is autonomous & asynchronous: In a continuous and distributed environment, planning must accommodate the need for teams to make decisions and take action outside a formal waterfall process.
• Drives continuous alignment: Planning assumptions and scenarios constantly evolve as the environment changes and decisions are taken. Planning must happen in real-time to support decision-makers with the latest insights to drive superior outcomes.

Adopting a smarter way of working (and planning) will ensure you, and your team, are able to focus on acting as a strategic business partner. Speaking from experience, here’s a crucial piece of advice; spreadsheets will not cope well with this kind of change. Neither will rigid, legacy finance solutions. For this, you will need to invest in a solution that empowers you to plan smarter and reap the rewards.

Check out the other blogs in this series:

• 2023 Finance Priority #1: Navigate through disruption
• 2023 Finance Priority #2: Make bold decisions
• 2023 Finance Priority #3: Enable growth
• 2023 Finance Priority #5: Look for talent beyond finance & accounting