Director of Finance

What makes a successful Director of Finance?

The Director of Finance plays a key role in the modern finance function as they are the decision-makers who ensure that teams operate efficiently. Cost savings and compliance are important factors that affect day-to-day financial operations.

A modern Director of Finance must work with the CFO to ensure that the tools they invest in are people-focused and provide a succinct user experience across financial teams. The right investments will ensure data accuracy, correct compliance, and enable efficiency without cost savings suffering.

Static tools like Excel, which aren’t intended to handle large datasets, burden financial teams with problematic manual workloads that inhibit their ability to communicate data effectively with other departments alongside providing accurate reports for forecasting.

Excel has a very literal limit – 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns – which highlights that the tools are not made to handle large datasets. The Director of Finance will already be dealing with inefficiencies due to talent shortages and needs advanced tools that prioritize user experience and streamlined processes to refocus on strategy.

^{As a Director of Finance or Finance Manager, what would you say has been the biggest pain point recently in meeting your objectives?}^{(Please select one)}

Increased compliance and governance requirements
Lack of up-to-date data
Limited transparency into financial operations

^{Are you spending more or less time entrenched consolidating data to support tasks such as financial consolidation, forecasting, or budgeting versus a year ago?}^{(Please select one)}

More time
About the same
Less time

Why is digital transformation important to the Director of Finance?

Legacy systems often present obstacles to both efficiency and cost-savings among financial teams. The Director of Finance must ensure that their teams are enabled to be efficient, especially where talent shortages are prominent.

Without digital tools, financial operations will continue to be hindered by fragmented data siloes, manual data entry, human error, long data consolidation times, and manual reporting – all of which will result in poor data accuracy and visibility, a lack of efficiency, and cost inefficiencies.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, enterprise-wide data strategy will become a key responsibility for at least 50% of those leading financial planning and analysis efforts.

Gartner – What will Finance Focus on in 2023

Cloud capabilities like automation can free accountants and financial analysts from manual workloads and ensure that all accounting procedures are followed correctly for succinct compliance.

Productivity is a key focus of the Director of Finance as accounting teams are generally suffering from talent shortages, while digital solutions can
help them complete low-value tasks and
refocus on high-value strategic analysis.