Resilience, Tech, and More: Trends for Finance Leaders to Know

Staying on top of the financial situation is, of course, a major part of your job. But today more than ever finance leaders also are expected to keep up with change. 

You and your team are being asked to look further down the road than in the past and play a wider role in the business at large. And top company leadership looks to you to be a partner with them, IT, and others to lead the company’s digital transformation. Because with an unpredictable economy, a labor crunch, regional conflicts, and other factors affecting the business, it’s vital to streamline processes and gain productivity. 

Our new white paper, 5 Trends for CFOs to Watch, examines topics that matter for finance leaders seeking to meet the challenges thrust upon them, including business resilience, technology and automation, employee experience, and data insights. The intent is to provide guidance that can help you satisfy an overarching goal: turning moments of uncertainty into moments of clarity and confidence so the business runs better.  

Strengthen your company 

Natural disasters, inflation, global instability, supply chains, sales that zoom and plummet. Who knows what comes next, but the fact is you must prepare the business to be more resilient no matter the disruption.  

Greater efficiency and productivity can build resiliency and automation that reduces manual work and processes can help. You aren’t alone in the pursuit of efficiency and productivity, as 65%1 of finance and IT leaders told¹ Analysys Mason they are a top strategy for containing costs. 

Travel, expense, and invoice management solutions that incorporate AI can monitor expenses and get smarter with each transaction, allowing your team to focus on work that matters while also providing the information and resources to better contend with disruption when it occurs. 

Speed the digital transformation 

Businesses like yours shifted to more hybrid work in recent years, and it’s unlikely to go away because you’ve learned to support it and employees like it. 

The new world of work drove the digitalisation of processes and technology, and that shift is here to stay. Finance and business leaders are well aware, with 72% saying² digital transformation is central to their growth. Intelligent automation – solutions embedded with AI and machine learning – brings speed, automation, and simplicity to once-manual processes, while giving your team greater agility and productivity. 

Improve the employee experience 

Many employees can now readily work from home as well as the office, and the shift in work environment has brought a change of mindset among both employees and employers. Any business seeking to attract and keep the best employees in a tight labor market must keep that change in mind. 

Providing the technology to enable flexible work – from cloud-based solutions to mobile apps – is a major step. So is seeing those solutions as a tool to improve the quality of work, by reducing the tedium and paper trails that come from tracking receipts, filling out expense reports, and maintaining spreadsheets. Seamless digital solutions can let your team focus on better work and, with talent tight, help cover labor gaps. 

Turn data into insights and decisions 

Data is not much help if you drown in it, unable to find the insights amid all that information.  

Intelligent solutions for travel & expense and other functions can give you a nearly real-time view of your company’s spending, providing accuracy along with greater compliance. Solutions that learn as they check expenses can deliver forecasts that enable sound spending decisions and allow you to quickly spot and pursue opportunities. 

Prioritise investments and spending 

You are being asked to do more with less, and intelligent solutions that increase efficiency and productivity can help you do that. 

Deciding on the right technology solutions – and making the case to invest and save – can require a bit of a team approach. So finance leaders guiding the process should work closely with IT leaders – and downstream users – to assess the business applications that will achieve their business goals and better prepare their business for disruptions good and bad. 

Learn more, build resilience

Read the white paper to further explore trends you should watch and learn how intelligent travel, expense, and invoice management solutions can help you meet the disruptions that are undoubtedly ahead. Not only is your company likely to be ready and resilient, but you and your career can be as well.

Read now

1, 2. Analysys Mason 2022, Travel, Expense, and Vendor Invoice Management Study