Finance professionals know that cash is the lifeblood of successful companies, and knowing where and when cash is coming into the business is of utmost importance.

However, while forecasting cash flow is imperative for high-performing finance teams, many teams are instead reviewing past metrics and performance.

In fact, one budgeting and planning luminary has said that the finance department sits at the back of the boat, looking at the wake and making observations of events that have already occurred. Instead, he says the corporate finance department needs to move to the front of the boat for success.

“Finance has got to get off the back of the boat and get up on the bridge, beside the captain, constantly looking forward, looking at change, what we try to do and what our options are. That’s where forecasting comes in, plotting a course for the future.” - Steve Player, The Player…

Now is the time to debunk the old age misconceptions around the corporate finance function.

In truth, people who work in corporate finance function aren’t boring people, they are the ones who are excited about what some may consider boring “stuff.” Why is this? Because boring “stuff” is the bedrock for any company to be successful. It’s the lifeline of the business.

Take one financial executive based in Atlanta. He lives and breathes finance, but his passion is triathlons. He spent day and night working on financial planning, manually inputting and reviewing financial data, checking audits, monitoring vendors. While he loved doing it, it did take up the majority of his time and he couldn’t focus on his other passions. After implementing financial automation to reduce the time he spent on manual tasks and increase his speed and productivity, he had enough time to both love his job and become a triathlete. …

The corporate finance back office is the backbone of any business, and yet, it’s been slow to adapt to changing technology and innovation.

It’s been a challenge to apply new technology to these departments. That’s a part of the reason for the relative sluggishness of digital transformation in accounting and finance. Fortunately, the tide is turning. More and more teams are looking to implement new finance automation and accounting automation technology to streamline and support these teams’ tasks.Take the AR department- accounts receivable automation means everyday tasks that took up most of a collector’s day can be reduced to a few clicks of a button. …

By Adina Simu, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder, Auditoria.AI

Right now, “Preserve Cash” is the call to action for all companies. But when you look closer, there’s something way bigger at work.

“COVID-19 has created an imperative for companies to reconfigure their operations, and an opportunity to transform them.[…] After switching to daily planning cycles and gaining real-time visibility of their operations, managers don’t want to return to the old cadence of monthly planning and metrics that lag behind the situation on the ground.”

On the other hand, the technology for solving these problems is far from trivial. A recent Gartner report includes the following list of technologies that would allow an enterprise to digitize their…

By Nick Ezzo, Vice President of Marketing, Auditoria.AI

A conversation with R “Ray” Wang of Constellation Research.

Earlier this year, I sat down with R “Ray” Wang, CEO and Founder of Constellation Research, to get a glimpse of what the future holds for the finance back office.

If you’ve ever been in a room with Ray, you know that he is an engaging and energetic guy. A self-described “futurist,” Ray gets extremely excited to share his vision of the future. It’s almost like he’s been to the future and he came back to tell us what it’s like.

▶️ We also created a video of our interview, which you can view here. …

For a long time, the corporate back office was inundated with paper processes, manual data entry and calculations, and more.

Enter ERP and cloud accounting software.

These technologies presented numerous opportunities for the corporate finance department. SaaS-based software meant that spreadsheets were no longer the “be-all-end-all” of the finance team (although spreadsheets are still incredibly useful). While this software has been incredibly helpful, technology has transformed all aspects of business, and these teams now need to be armed with more than just basic software and spreadsheets to be successful.

2020 Automation in ERP and the Finance Back Office Survey

While financial automation has been around for years, many corporate finance teams still have yet to take full advantage of the technology. We recently surveyed several hundred financial professionals to determine the top challenges facing corporate finance teams and the current automation level within the corporate finance back office. …

Technology is advancing so rapidly that it can take entire industries years to completely overhaul their outdated internal operation to implement new digital practices. Though finance departments have adopted digitization, customer-facing processes have been digitalized far more quickly than similar back-office updates. The result is a fast-paced game of catch up to update internal operations. Finance is facing its digital finance transformation reckoning.

The major challenge of enacting a digital transformation in finance departments is the money aspect. It’s crucial to play it safe when dealing with financial information, regardless of the context. …

By Nick Ezzo, Vice President of Marketing, Auditoria.AI

The world we live in now is much different than it was six months ago: a globally distributed customer base, myriad payment forms, blockchain technologies, not to mention a global pandemic that has caused businesses across the globe to halt operations.

Finance teams have always had to deal with constant communication and follow-ups with customers and vendors, but throw a pandemic into the mix, and finance teams can no longer accurately predict if payments will be received on time.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was once thought of as the silver bullet in the world of corporate finance. At the heart of ERP is a ledger that records financial transactions, and the advent of ERP meant that there was a system designed to deal with multiple transactions. …