What are the key technologies to master to become a CFO?
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CEO in Finance (non-banking)a year ago
You have traditional CFOs and fresh CFOs. Fresh CFOs are more open to finance transformation and digital transformation. Since I lead my own business, I've learned to master tools that are outside of finance, like Canva - I highly recommend other CFOs to do so too! Power BI is a great tool to learn as well and it can help with clearly communicating complexity to an organization. Also having a commanding level of knowledge with CRM tools, like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Marketo. These all can create productivity and have a great impact on your business. Also, a few different RPA tools that are great to learn are Microsoft Power Automate or Zapier, which have a direct bottom line to the finance organization. I think learning project management tools, like Click Up is great. It’s good if you're managing a lot of different projects and assigning different tasks/projects to people.
CFO in Finance (non-banking)a year ago
For the past 50 years or more, technology has accelerated at an increasing rate. This impacts all roles – not just finance and accounting. But like many roles, as the pace of technology is accelerated, the role of the CFO has shifted more quickly than it has historically. What used to be the fundamental things that you'd look for in a CFO, like financial management, strategic thinking, risk management, communication, leadership, and business acumen, are all just table stakes. Now the CFO is being asked to do more. It's the technologies on the one hand, but it's the underlying skills that you need to have to drive real-time data-driven decisions. The ability to understand data science/data analytics is fundamental; and knowing how to update forecasts using modern tools. CFOs need to understand the correlation and causation between certain elements and factor that into the decision-making. Across the tech spectrum, we’re of course seeing how ERP systems are big because of how much data you can collect in those, or maybe by connecting different pieces of software APIs. There's been a lot of automation with tools like RPA (robotic process automation) for several years. People have been using it for things like accounts payable and accounts receivable, and finding ways to automate these processes that used to have to be done by people. The latest is generative AI, but no one is quite sure how to incorporate that yet. Cyber security and data privacy get more important every day as more information is moved to the cloud. So an understanding of what the data architecture is and how your data is being kept secure. Rather than pick a single technology it’s more important to have more of a mindset and a foundational understanding of what's out there. As new technologies come along, you just keep building on that foundational technological understanding.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems: An ERP system integrates different business processes such as finance, HR, sales, and procurement into a single database, providing real-time data that can be used to make informed decisions.