Digital Transformation Blueprint

for the Office of the CFO

Proactive chief financial officers (CFOs) today must give serious consideration and devote appropriate resources to proper digital transformation of their operating model within the finance organization. The overwhelming majority of CFOs today—86% ¹—now view the digitization of financial processes such as accounts receivable/accounts payable systems as central to improving customer satisfaction, customer retention, and revenue generation.

As a result of this need to rethink business operations, it’s clear that adopting automation and digitization is not only the new normal, but is essential. In other words, it’s a must-have to build companywide resiliency and long-term sustainability. This accelerated path to digital transformation also helps to better connect the Office of the CFO with the overall organization to not just thrive effectively but also to guide the organization into the future. For these reasons, CFOs must now play a more strategic role by guiding critical business decisions.

One of the main challenges the Office of the CFO faces is that finance data typically is relegated to traditional systems such as accounting and budgeting systems and spreadsheets. Even when there is no future-looking financial transformation plan in place, manual processes create major roadblocks around the order-to-cash (O2C) and record-to-report (R2R) process. This leaves data that’s not accessible to members of the wider organization who may need visibility into that data to make strategic decisions effectively. However, with digital O2C processes in place, the process of turning orders into cash typically costs 56% less,² a figure that rises the smaller a business is, due to fixed minimum overhead of accounts receivable.