chapter 03
Building a Strategic Finance Function
With AI as your partner, take the necessary steps to optimize your data and bring it across the enterprise for continuous planning and strategic alignment.
DOWNLOAD FULL REPORTIn fact, finance functions are moving heavily in the direction of strategic finance.
What Is Strategic Finance?
Strategic finance is the art of gathering your company’s operational and financial data, as well as external data, and turning it into real-time insights for decision making.
It’s table stakes for such agility-boosting practices as:
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Rolling forecasts -
Scenario modeling
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Predictive analytics
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Thus, it helps businesses stick to strategic objectives, unlock growth and allocate resources more effectively, even in periods of disruption.
The Expanding Scope—and Imperative—of the Finance Function
Strategic finance is both a cultural and operational departure from traditional three-statement financial reporting, which is retrospective and myopic in scope by comparison.
Because strategic finance depends on crossfunctional data input, your finance function must transform around three key dimensions:
Become more collaborative across the business, interfacing regularly with different departments and leadership.
Develop a capacity for data aggregation and sharing.
Generate predictive and prescriptive analysis with strong explanatory narratives.
Enabling Technologies
AI, automation and cloud software have a combinatorial effect on the three dimensions of strategic finance transformation:
Collaboration
By consolidating data, standardizing it and removing silos, cloud and AI automation tools allow people of varied roles and abilities to quickly visualize, share and customize data.
Capacity
Cloud, natural language processing (NLP) and automated tools are phasing out old spreadsheet models, automating tasks like document processing at scale.
Analysis
AI and automation can instantly parse huge volumes of real-time data from countless sources—pinpointing growth drivers and outliers to automatically render insights.
Strategic Finance In Action: Next Steps
Use our checklist to assess your company’s data capabilities. Then, get steps for using your data to build influence and alignment across your organization.
DOWNLOAD The CHECKLIST
Uncover the Blueprint for Finance Transformation
Get all of the insights from the playbook to share with your team.
About the Future of Finance Survey
The Paro Future of Finance survey used online interviews conducted among members of the Vitreous World panel, with respondents representing US-based C-Suite executives or senior management in Accounting or Finance; the resulting sample was statistically representative.
