Dynamics 365 Powers Adaptability for Chief Financial Officers
The role of the chief financial officer (CFO) has been evolving for several years. What first began as a position to oversee financial operations across accounting, reporting, treasury, etc. has now progressed to the creation and management of financial as well as large-scale digital transformation efforts. CFOs today are expected to rapidly adapt the organization to trends and disruptions that are only increasing in complexity and frequency. To survive and thrive in today’s post-pandemic world and seamlessly adjust to new business models, CFOs have to take some critical and quick steps to up their adaptability game. Let’s look at some of the hurdles CFOs might face when beginning their journeys with Dynamics 365 Finance.
Common Challenges CFOs Face
Today’s CFOs play an extremely active role in the overall running of the business and bring along an array of broad, strategic responsibilities to the table. Most CFOs today are also responsible for functions outside of finance; they have to forge new strategic partnerships, undertake technology evaluation efforts, and constantly work toward surpassing revenue and earnings goals. But achieving strategic growth is a Herculean task.
Here are 5 major roadblocks that CFOs face today as they seek to improve business agility:
#1 Legacy systems are increasingly becoming a major hurdle facing CFOs in their agility efforts. These systems are not only built using proprietary technology but they also lack the latest features and capabilities needed to respond to evolving business needs.
#2 Data silos are another challenge that restricts CFOs from reacting to disruptions with agility. With businesses relying on a multitude of disparate systems to run their business, CFOs need more visibility to make effective decisions or drive enterprise-wide innovation.
#3 Manual processes limit CFOs’ ability to drive quick and intelligent decisions. A change-averse workforce, budget constraints, or a growing skills gap make it difficult for CFOs to leverage the benefits of automation.
#4 Supporting an increasingly hybrid workforce also doesn’t come easy for CFOs – especially in the absence of the right policies. Although the shift to a hybrid business model opens several opportunities, CFOs need to curate new strategies and invest in new solutions to experience success.
#5 Effective risk management is another facet of the business that CFOs are increasingly expected to tend to. Since they aren’t just economic guardians but also risk mitigators, CFOs find themselves slumped with the responsibility of identifying and preventing fraud and safeguarding the business from cybersecurity attacks.
How Dynamics 365 Finance Drives adaptability
With disruptive events here to stay, CFOs have to make significant changes to their financial and operating models to adapt to and overcome these constant fluctuations. For those looking to develop flexibility and adaptability and achieve resilience, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance helps in transforming business models and making them strong enough to counter disruptions. Using Dynamics 365 Finance, CFOs can not only overcome the roadblocks they face on the journey to becoming more agile, but they can also streamline operations, enhance financial management and planning, and enable strategic decision-making.
Let’s look at 6 ways in which Dynamics 365 Finance helps in driving agility and adaptability:
1. Modernizes the IT Landscape
As a unified enterprise system that brings the entire business together, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance helps in modernizing the IT landscape, enabling CFOs to drive more value from their technology systems. Steering the shift from rigid monolithic structures, Dynamics 365 enables CFOs to grow equity, assets, and profits more quickly than their counterparts while also enabling them to pivot to new sales and service models rapidly. Dynamics 365’s standardized capabilities help unlock adaptability and improve agility to align with new trends and embrace new business models.
2. Provides a Single Source of Truth
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance offers a comprehensive set of out-of-the-box capabilities that minimizes the time and effort needed to customize and maintain resource-intensive applications. By combining disparate and disconnected via a centralized platform, Dynamics 365 makes data silos a thing of the past, allowing for enterprise-wide data integration and reconciliation. This flexibility and extensibility provide a single, updated source of truth which can then be used to drive adaptability via quicker, data-backed decisions.
3. Enables Intelligent Automation
For CFOs struggling to break free from the clutches of manual labor, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance enables intelligent automation across the business. By automating the core set of financial and operational processes that support the organization, Dynamics 365 empowers CFOs to innovate and transform. Through constant processing of large, complex data sets, the Dynamics 365 platform delivers AI-powered capabilities that help boost the efficiency and quality of business operations.
4. Delivers Customer Payment Insights
One of the main pain points for any CFO is dealing with customers who do not make payments on time. The lack of timely and accurate insight leads to the inability to reliably estimate cash flow and collection delays. It might also lead to the release of products to consumers who are incapable or unwilling to pay.
Customer Payment Insights leverages the power of machine learning combined with historical customer data analysis to predict when a customer invoice will be paid. Such insight will help CFOs to formulate strategies in a way that enhances the probability of collections being made on time.
5. Enables Seamless Cashflow Forecasting
Each business must have a steady, continuous cash flow for survival but predicting it can be challenging. The process of attempting to connect the dots between siloed data to produce a coherent picture and enable sound predictions can be grueling – and largely futile. Any inaccurate forecast can lead to ineffective strategies and wrong decisions.
Here is where the capabilities of Finance insights save the day. Dynamics 365 Finance allows companies to make the most of data-driven insights by utilizing the estimates from the time-series cash flow combined with the previously mentioned customer payment predictions while also seamlessly integrating data from external systems and reports.
6. Allows for Intelligent Budget Proposals
Budget preparation is a time and resource-intensive process; scrubbing historical data takes up a lot of time but is critical to provide an accurate view of the past.
Intelligent Budget Proposals help alleviate a lot of this work by mining historical data, which enables better decisions. It helps teams streamline the budgeting process and forecast a clear-eyed budget based on what it should look like with reference to what has happened over time.
Maximize Enterprise Visibility with Dynamics 365 Finance
As chief financial officer responsibilities advance, there is a pressing need to embrace the right technology solutions to drive adaptability. Gartner states that by 2023, organizations that have successfully renovated their ERP platforms will achieve at least a 40% improvement in IT agility to deliver business outcomes. It’s about time CFOs invest in the right platforms.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 empowers CFOs with all the capabilities they need to flourish in today’s highly disruptive era. By modernizing legacy systems, enabling a real-time, single version of the truth, and delivering AI-driven insights, Dynamics 365 Finance is helping CFOs strengthen their IT infrastructure, mitigate risks, and lead their organizations to innovative growth.
