How Collaborating with Finance Supports Good Decisions
In today’s relationship-oriented business environment, who you know and how you work with them are as important as anything you do. Collaboration is just as essential to finance as it is in naturally “creative” functions such as sales and marketing.
When I first started this series of posts, I mentioned that it was in response to the thoughts Kelly Barner shared on procurement’s hierarchy of needs: first savings, then compliance, moving on to risk and finally — collaboration. So, for procurement, savings is the most fundamental need. No other goals or objectives can realistically be addressed unless the organization’s spend is being efficiently negotiated and managed.
CFO’s Bread and Butter: Compliance & Risk
Thanks for joining our series of posts comparing how factors such as timing and cost are seen differently by finance, procurement and legal.
Compliance and risk are no different. While procurement may see compliance and risk management as being a few rungs up their strategic maturity ladder, for finance — and legal, I might add — they are the bedrock of our existence in the organization. If a CFO isn’t focused on ensuring compliance and risk management, he or she isn’t going to be in that job for very long.
Timing is everything to a CFO, as they say, so let’s talk about the importance of timing in finance.
It probably goes without saying that accuracy is the bedrock of sound financial decisions. At the same time, often the pace of business requires finance to make decisions before influencing circumstances become certainties. As a CFO, my confidence in each decision is tied to how far into the future I have to project data in order to make a judgement call.
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When you’re a CFO – no matter what company you happen to work for – it’s hard not to take a straight line finance perspective. As the CFO of Determine, I’m constantly faced with the challenge of balancing the requirements of finance and accounting with the needs of procurement and legal. After all, they are our customers too.
We’ve all gotten so used to everything being “in the cloud” that many of us have stopped thinking about what it really means for enterprise business – and what it makes possible. I dug into the topic in a conversation with Tim Scott, a Business Consultant Manager at Determine, to follow up on some of […]
Realizing the Full Benefits of Center led Procurement As procurement organizations of all sizes and maturity levels embark on transformation projects, many consider it within scope to re-evaluate the structure of their team and how procurement interacts with the rest of the enterprise.
How the changing role of General Counsel is shaping contract integration. The role of the General Counsel in companies across industries continues to evolve beyond just legal responsibilities. As businesses increase their focus on contract management due to factors like increased M&A, stricter regulatory environments and increased supply chain risk, they’re amplifying their reliance on […]
Contracts, in one form or another, have probably been around as long as humans. There isn’t much written on the topic until Plato got around to it in 348 BC, and even he doesn’t go into much detail. Fast forward to today, and contracts are a fact of life. Business is built on contracts, and […]
