The Tech Office of the CFO is Coming … Finally A

Yes, it is.

And while The Prophet thinks the naysayers will call him a fool, all the doctor can say is, join the club! There’s lots of room … only a few of us have been correctly calling the future for almost two decades, and all of us who have been have also been called foolish, crazy, and worse. I’d rather be right than popular. At least I’ll be ready for what’s coming …

COVID started a big push into “FinTech” investments as everyone realized that no-travel, and even no offices, meant you needed online/SaaS payment systems, contract systems, financing systems (as you couldn’t walk into a bank), etc. The CFO slowly realized there was more to modern Finance Tech (FinTech) than online spreadsheets. Plus, as they realized they needed visibility into Legal and Procurement, they wanted companion contract, risk, and P2P systems and/or customized interfaces for them.

As a result, we will start to see the rise of Finance suites that, as The Prophet points out, will integrate:

• FP&A
• AR & O2C
• AP
• Treasury
• Payments
• SCF
• Expense Management
• Commodity Management
• Risk
• Corp Dev / M&A
• P2P

as well as

• Contracts
• Spend Intelligence (with all data/reports updated at least monthly)
• Inventory Management (with visibility into overhead costs vs. depreciation)

Moreover, as The Prophet has pointed out, each of these areas is very complex. Spend Matters considers AP alone as including the following areas: core AP workflow, dynamic discounting, e-invoicing compliance, fraud detection and prevention, supply chain finance, tax compliance, tax management and working capital management.

When you get into AR/O2C, you then get into PO receipt and tracking, shipment tracking and notification, invoice generation and transmission, invoice receipt acknowledgement, payment receipt, etc.

Expense Management may or may not include P-cards and/or virtual cards, and may or may not include catalogs, travel management, integrated airline or hotel bookings, app integration for auto-expense report generation (snap & go), etc.

Risk breaks down across multiple dimensions across supplier and supply chain risk, and for more information, see the doctor‘s Source-to-Pay series (especially Parts 15 to 20) and the first 9 parts of the doctor‘s Source-to-Pay+ series which are all on (primarily) supply chain risk.

Contract management breaks down into Negotiation, Analytics, and Governance, and each of these area has a lot of baseline functionality that is required (as covered in the Source-to-Pay series referenced above in parts 21 to 25).

And so on … it’s a mega-suite that goes far beyond your average S2P mega-suite.

However, before writing off the effort as too intensive or too expensive, one must remember that Finance is ultimately responsible for cutting the cheque, so they are going to want visibility into where the money goes and how it is supposed to be used. Not to mention, sometimes the only authority they need to cut the cheque is their own, so it might be an easier sale to sell or joint-sell to the CFO as well as another C-Suite exec. So a great FinTech Suite could be the easiest sell a new back office tech start up or aggregator could have!

Data, Data, Data A

The Prophet has said that data will be your best friend in procurement and supply chain in 2024 if you give it chance.

And then asked Is 2024 the year you final opt to invest in [data] at the level you should?

Because it should be. As The Prophet also said, if for nothing else, do it to avoid being made the business function where fingers point when things go wrong, which they most definitely will if you don’t take every step you can make sure they don’t (and they still will, but you can be prepared for it and ensure that the disruption that happens is as minimized as possible). However, as I noted in a comment on the original article:

It’s not just better data analysis systems, it’s better data … chances are, if you haven’t been applying proper data governance, and let’s face it, there’s a 99%+ chance you haven’t, you need cleaner, richer, better organized data.

Also remember that’s not as easy as just buying some AI-based auto classifier / enrichment tool that will enrich your brake shoe database with the latest Girotti Oxfords and Montcler runners or take your incorrect supplier abbreviation and classify a denied party as perfectly safe when they are known to source from organizations that use slave labour and supply to militant groups and terrorists. (Don’t think it won’t happen if you fully trust an AI-based auto-classifer/recommender engine. It will. It has!)

Trusted data sources, such as those you get from data enrichers like Tealbook or validators like Apex Analytix will go a long way, but you will still have to manually review and fix those that can’t be auto-matched with very high accuracy (high accuracy is good enough for spend analysis, it’s not good enough for regulatory compliance or risk prevention).

And remember, have fun fishing the data lake you’ve neglected since you literally installed your first database. You never know what you’ll catch. While you’ll hook a lot of old rubber boots on your lines, you may also haul up a solid gold bar! Remember, you never dredged the lake, and there will be some priceless relics mixed in with the rancid pile of garbage.

Moreover, without great data, and the insight that comes from great data, the downside risk of the visibility, insight, predictive and actionable capability you lack today is immense and likely incalculable.

Once you have the data, you can easily install the right compliance, risk, and visibility platforms and achieve the intended results. (But without the right data, those solutions will be worse than expensive shelf-ware because if they are used, they will give the wrong results and insights that will lead to worse decisions than if they weren’t installed at all!)