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A well known company’s stock takes a beating on the stock markets…not for under-performance or any other scientific reason, but for the reluctance of the company to issue revenue guidelines for the forthcoming quarters.
 
In markets where company stakeholders are brutal in the event off missed guidance, it becomes essential for the chief financial officer (CFO) to be able to grasp future budgets, balance financial information with intangibles like customers, employees, geographies and drill down on these variables to provide a reliable forecast of the company's performance.

Financial forecasting is both art and a science. While the performance of a company depends upon a myriad off external factors that can never be in the CFO’s control, advanced data management and analytical tools can help him put in the place the initial building blocks required to view the business from any perspective.

As a financial controller, he is a key member of the strategic planning process and is responsible for formulating operating budgets. He also has to compile individual operational budgets into a cohesive whole. This is tough since within traditional firms, there has always been a disconnect between finance and operations. The process usually begins with departmental managers experiencing delays in submitting their budget worksheets and culminating months later with reports that are based on old data and that have consumed too much of the CFO's time. This is true in nine out of ten firms.

What is required is a link between operational planning and corporate strategic planning. To make this link,, companies must replace their spreadsheets and legacy systems with specialized software that provides multidimensional views of information, a central data repository, strong forecasting capabilities, detailed reporting and analysis with results that can be distributed throughout the organization.

As the custodian of the company's financials, the CFO has to manage the entire consolidation process and adapt to changing reporting standards and disclosure requirements. This is extremely crucial since compliance to

various reporting requirements and the ability to communicate information to stakeholders from different perspectives is vital.

The more complex and decentralized an organization, the tougher is the role off the CFO, since it becomes cumbersome to quickly consolidate data from multiple group companies, perform inter-company eliminations,, ensure the accuracy of that data, predict the impact of business decisions on financial performance, and drill into financial data to understand not only what, but why.

However, conventional accounting packages, in-house systems and spreadsheets have not kept pace with the financial planning requirements. Today, however, a revolution's needed—one that builds on the legacy of various computing advances, while offering something more.

That something more is a financial management solution that provides the CFO a single window with built in financial intelligence to address the entire spectrum of analytic needs like budgeting and planning, financial forecasting, reporting and analysis and cost management to help drive an integrated performance management approach to business. Instead of a pure policing role, it allows the CFO to become a partner in the organization allowing him to think what he has to do, how to measure and control the company and prioritize his areas off focus. As a business partner in an organization, the CFO builds close inter-linkages between the SBUs and the finance function. For example,, building a scientific cost allocation framework based on organizational modeling of activities and processes allows rational bench-marking, performance evaluation and establishes the frame work for strategic initiatives like CRM.

Backed by the power of information, a financial officer is thus in a position to predict knowledgeably about his company’s future performance. And while the predictions may not always excite investors, it provides stakeholders a share of power in simply knowing.