The 2022 CFO Playbook for Strategic Decision-Making

The strategic role of the CFO has become less about finance and accounting and more about becoming a strategic partner to the entire organization. It’s especially true as 2022 promised to bring continued uncertainty along with new opportunities for growth. Pushing forward requires CFOs to get involved in the business and convey the importance of the numbers to provide more strategic guidance to the business.

Read Financial Leadership: The CFO Playbook for Strategic Decision-Making to understand how CFOs can use their financial and business expertise to inform and influence financial, strategic, operational, and other decisions and actions across the company. 

In this CFO Playbook eBook, you’ll read how more and more research is pointing to a modern CFO role that goes far beyond finance and accounting. Many strategic CFOs are taking control of workforce planning, IT, DE&I (diversity, equity, and inclusion), ESG (environmental, social, and governance), and more. However, about half of CEOs think their CFO lacks the business acumen necessary to effectively expand their role beyond finance and accounting. That has to change.

This disconnect between the broadening role of the CFO and the apparent need for increased organizational and business knowledge now gives CFOs an opportunity to expand their skills and close that gap. The ebook dives into several areas where CFOs can begin to focus their efforts in succeeding as a strategic CFO.

New trends for strategic CFOs:

• Get proactively involved with all corners of the business. Becoming a strategic CFO involves deeper collaboration with your business counterparts to really understand the challenges they face. You can begin by immersing yourself in all areas of the business. Get out into the offices and operations, shadow teams as they work, and attend a prospect meeting with a sales rep. Then, use your expertise to bring a practical financial perspective to their challenges.
• Tell a story with the data. CFOs are quantitative by nature, so use data and numbers as part of the CFO Playbook to help the business understand the crux of their challenges. Use data and related visualizations to reinforce the narrative you’re trying to articulate. What you convey should be a compelling story arc, from background to current situation to the obvious resolution.
• Extend planning and analysis into the business. More companies are shifting their planning efforts from financial planning and analysis (FP&A) to extended planning and analysis (xP&A). This move is an important part of a CFO strategic plan that combines the financial plan and data as the center of the business plan while providing a holistic view of the entire organization. With so much data and collaboration necessary, it’s difficult to do xP&A with spreadsheets and manual processes. But modernizing to a dedicated xP&A platform is how most organizations (70% according to Gartner) are making the leap.

Get the CFO Playbook today to understand how and why modern CFOs are looking to expand their skills beyond finance and accounting and offer more strategic leadership to the entire business. It’s a quick CFO strategy guide to getting the business expertise you need to become the leader your organization needs.