Magical Glasses for the CFO

I am sure it is the aspiration of every CFO to simply wear a pair of magical glasses that immediately gives them a bird’s eye view of the financial health of their company. The needs of each business are different, and it indeed will be a tall order to build the perfect pair of magical glasses. However, it is also not so difficult to abstract the problem and arrive at a reasonably common set of indicators that CFOs need to track irrespective of their business. The process of mining the information and deriving meaningful intelligence from it should not in itself become nightmarish. Similarly, it should be relatively easy to choose the mode of delivering that information – be it a dashboard or a distributable MIS report. With a pair of these magical glasses, strategic decision making process can be easily accelerated.

Here is my wish-list for my pair of magical glasses:

· The ability to compare information across various dimensions - periods, entities, divisions, cost-centers, geographies etc.

· Collection of widgets – each of which will communicate an important piece of information, like margins, ratios, sales, ageing etc.

· Graphical charts that can drill-down to the lowest level of information

· Completely customizable MIS reports, so that I get what I want, and not what the software thinks I should get

As a CFO what would you like to see when you wear your pair of magical glasses?

Comments

Top 5 Financial KPIs for the CXO

Let’s say you got up this morning with a headache. You know from experience that it’s a small niggle, and it will go away on its own. But what if you got up tomorrow morning, and the headache got worse? If an aspirin doesn't help, you will surely go to a doctor, and most likely get some diagnostic checks done. A KPI (key performance indicators) dashboard is like a diagnostics report of various parameters that reflect the health of your business. KPI’s help you measure your business’s financial health. You can define KPIs for different areas of your business, from HR, Finance, Marketing to Operations. You can combine these KPIs to arrive at an overall health for your business. The Finance function is like the blood flowing through your body; it affects each part of it and keeps it healthy and oxygenated. Similarly, your company’s financial performance has a direct impact on every aspect of your business. Remember, that KPI’s and dashboards are not just for CFO’s...

3 ways to energize your Corporate reporting process

Every decent sized organization deals with management reporting as CXOs and the board expect to receive regular updates on the organization’s performance. Depending on the size of the organization, you could have one or more financial analysts toiling away in putting together the required corporate reports. In most cases this is a time-consuming exercise, leaving little time for analysing the data and taking prompt action. This doesn’t have to be the case though. Here are 3 ways for you to energize your corporate reporting process: 1.Efficient information architecture design There is sometimes a less than optimum understanding of what constitutes good information architecture for an organization. Most organizations feel that a good ERP will take care of managing operations as well as reporting. This is obviously untrue. Most CFOs think this due to the fact that they are not able to derive the most from the power of their ERP. An ERP, in itself, is only a piece of the sys...

FinAlyzer helps every business measure its financial health accurately and on time

FinAlyzer helps every business measure its financial health accurately and on time and provides actionable insights.

BeyondSquare FinAlyzer - Your partner for Financial Consolidation, Close, Analytics & Reporting

Search This Blog