5 Essential Finance Strategies
As the role of the CFO evolves, the function and priorities of the office must also adapt to the changing landscape of the finance world. In the face of pandemic recovery, supply chain disruptions, inflation, and other variables, it’s time to focus on investment and growth. Watch this webinar to learn how leading finance organizations are modernizing processes to build resilience.
Crucial strategies you should focus on
Coupa's CFO, Tony Tiscornia, guides you through best practices to modernize and streamline your finance processes, including how to:
- Build resilience in the face of a downturn
- Modernize payment processes
- Maximize the efficiency of existing working capital
- Reduce risk and make compliance easier
- Invest in the best digital transformation technologies.
Tune in to this webinar for a deep dive into the top five finance strategies, with the CFO of Coupa Tony Tiscornia. We start off with answers to the question of what the future holds for finance leaders, and will then discuss the top five strategies to address the challenges.
Featured Speakers
Tony Tiscornia
Chief Financial Officer
Coupa Software
Ulrika Haug
Sr. Director Product Marketing
Coupa Software
Here are some strategies that I think are essential… The first is building financial resilience and agility. The second is modernizing and optimizing payments. Of course, the way most businesses do payments for many decades now is a very old, arcane, decentralized process that’s very inefficient, and it doesn’t need to be that way. Third is maximizing working capital in what I would expect to be a rising interest rate environment… Fourth is making financial compliance easier and reducing risk… And finally, which encapsulates the previous points and is its own point in and of itself as well, is investing in digital transformation… How can we leverage systems and processes to implement best practices to solve these problems?
FAQ
What are some of the trends that will shape how financial leaders should approach their job?
First, the majority of CFOs have reported that supply chain disruption has impacted their business. Many CFOs are looking to improve the visibility and control they have over their supply chains. More than half of CFOs expect the demand to return to the pre-pandemic levels in the next year or two years. Uncertainties will continue throughout 2022, especially with tax law changes, geopolitical changes, a potential fiscal stimulus, and more. CFOs will continue to look into ways that they can make their organization more agile and resilient, as well as how to have more visibility and control of all aspects of their business spend. Many CFOs have been narrowing the gap between defensive and expansionary policies, and these two trends will be more balanced in 2022.
What are the five top pain points for finance executives?
CFOs have been hampered by an inability to quickly gather and disseminate business-critical information to the necessary stakeholders. The first pain point is the difficulty of communicating financial and business metrics to stakeholders effectively. Secondly, the capital appropriation process is not well coordinated with long-term planning. Third, financial compliance is a major challenge as it becomes more difficult to stay on top of regulations. Fourth, the period-end financial consolidations are cumbersome and time-consuming. And the fifth pain point is the challenges of detecting and preventing fraud.
What does Coupa do to help companies, and what is it about Coupa that makes it different?
A simple analogy helps explain what Coupa does: Coupa is to Business Spend Management (BSM) what Salesforce is to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM is the topline for financial leaders because it manages sales and revenue. Then Human Capital Management (HCM) helps organizations to manage the human beings they employ–their biggest investment in their business. So, you have the topline with CRM, your people with HCM, and when you look at the rest of your business spend, that’s where Coupa comes in with Business Spend Management. It spans from sourcing, negotiating with suppliers, modifying contracts to writing purchase orders, invoice processing and payments and expense reports, all the way to analyzing your spend to enable you to make better decisions to support the business.
At Coupa, we have a clear vision for how to deliver Business Spend Management (BSM) value. It’s spelled out in the letters of our name, C, O, U, P, A. The “C” is for “Comprehensive.” At Coupa, we’re looking to build the most comprehensive platform in the Business Spend Management space. We want you to be able to manage all aspects of your business’s spending in one unified, centralized platform that’s fully in the cloud. The “O” stands for the fact that Coupa is an open platform, both technically and in spirit. We work with many partners to provide the best experience and the best capabilities for our customers. As far as the “U,” Coupa aims to be a user-centric platform. One of the keys to our success so far has been that our customers attain high levels of adoption of the Coupa tool with their employees. It’s very easy to learn how to use Coupa with minimal training, and employees feel empowered when they have more control over and visibility into business processes and spend. The “P” in Coupa stands for “prescriptive” insights. We leverage what we call “community intelligence” or community AI from all customers across the platform so that we can give each of our customers recommendations for the actions they can take to make better spending decisions. Finally, the “A” in Coupa is for “Accelerated,” since Coupa aims to do everything fast. We like to help customers “go live” at a rapid pace and help them quickly drive value through the platform to see immediate value from identifying savings and see a return on investment and improved speed and efficiency in their business.
At Coupa, we have a clear vision for how to deliver Business Spend Management (BSM) value. It’s spelled out in the letters of our name, C, O, U, P, A. The “C” is for “Comprehensive.” At Coupa, we’re looking to build the most comprehensive platform in the Business Spend Management space. We want you to be able to manage all aspects of your business’s spending in one unified, centralized platform that’s fully in the cloud. The “O” stands for the fact that Coupa is an open platform, both technically and in spirit. We work with many partners to provide the best experience and the best capabilities for our customers. As far as the “U,” Coupa aims to be a user-centric platform. One of the keys to our success so far has been that our customers attain high levels of adoption of the Coupa tool with their employees. It’s very easy to learn how to use Coupa with minimal training, and employees feel empowered when they have more control over and visibility into business processes and spend. The “P” in Coupa stands for “prescriptive” insights. We leverage what we call “community intelligence” or community AI from all customers across the platform so that we can give each of our customers recommendations for the actions they can take to make better spending decisions. Finally, the “A” in Coupa is for “Accelerated,” since Coupa aims to do everything fast. We like to help customers “go live” at a rapid pace and help them quickly drive value through the platform to see immediate value from identifying savings and see a return on investment and improved speed and efficiency in their business.
