CFO Challenges CFOs of growth companies need to focus their time on ensuring the organization is adequately capitalized and helping the business understand financial impacts to make optimal business decisions. Unfortunately, most often they also need to improve the immature financial infrastructure of the business to meet more complex reporting needs and ensure that operational inefficiencies don’t become a bottleneck to growth.
The paradigm: Ultimately your value as CFO will be judged on the level of insight and guidance you provide to the business, but your time is regularly consumed addressing the operational needs of the business.
RightNetworks Client Testimonial
Mike Dionne is the CFO of a private equity-backed SaaS company with 350 employees. Their private equity sponsor was regularly evaluating acquisition targets. Mike needed to establish a finance function that could support those new acquisitions.
The Goal
Half of Mike’s time was spent on transactional accounting and closing the books. He was operating more as a Controller rather than a CFO because his time was consumed in the day-to-day back-office. Mike knew he needed more time to focus on strategy to add value to the company. This was compounded when they took on three acquisitions in one year. While taking on new acquisitions, the finance team had to set up a new process with an entirely new chart of accounts. This was time consuming and ineffective. They quickly outgrew their finance & accounting technology and needed to find a new solution that could easily handle acquisitions.
The Challenge
Their private equity sponsor was frequently bringing investment opportunities to the table. The primary challenge that they were trying to resolve was how to manage folding new acquisitions into the finance function. Using QuickBooks for multi-entity structure was not ideal. There was a different chart of accounts for each entity. The lack of multi-entity accounting capabilities within QuickBooks meant they needed to re-evaluate the finance & accounting software. They had taken on three acquisitions in one year and it was a very heavy lift. Furthermore, Mike did not have a team that could burst when they needed the additional support. He looked at Consero and the Finance as a Service model as an opportunity to solve the problem.
Consero’s Impact
Spend More Time on Strategy
After implementing Consero’s Finance as a Service model, Mike was spending less than 5% of his time overseeing the close and reporting process. He now uses 95% of his time to be a strategic partner to the business and private equity sponsor. He now works on key initiatives and looking at acquisition opportunities. It has been a significant change and strong impact on his role.
Accurate and Real-Time Business Insight
Mike’s able to get a complete overview of the business by the information provided by Consero’s SIMPL software stack. There is a standard set of reports that business leaders can easily access from SIMPL. Those include actual operating results vs. plan vs. prior year. The team can evaluate metrics and get a very clear picture of how they are performing in different functional areas vs. how they expected to perform vs. how they performed in the past.
On-Demand Finance Team
Consero’s Finance as a Service solution is unique because it not only provides the skilled finance team that can tackle the back-office transactional work but can also scale as the company experiences a spike.
Better Investor Relations
The relationship with Consero has allowed Mike to move quickly with their private equity investors to evaluate potential acquisitions. If they were to swiftly execute on an opportunity, he is confident that they could fold it in quickly and seamlessly.
Recommending Consero
Mike would recommend Consero to other organizations. If you need to move fast, need flexibility and want your finance team to be a strong strategic partner to the business rather than a transactional partner . . . then you should consider Consero. Consero excels at all of that.
Consero gives you:
- Increased transparency and understanding of your financials
- Reduced time spent on finance & administration
- Scalable and efficient financial operations
Empowering the CFO
Consero provides CFOs with a complete platform of integrated web-based operational software, customizable best-practice based processes and reliable back-office services that serve as a scalable operational foundation for delivering financial support to the CFO and the business.
Why Consero?
People – We effectively manage all your daily financial needs, including payroll, accounts payable, accounts receivable, travel, and entertainment. We provide our clients with improved visibility into their financial operations and greater scalability at a lower cost point than what can be achieved through traditional in-house operations. Our Bookkeeping Services can be customized to meet your needs.
Processes – We establish financial controls to safeguard and monitor revenue and expenditures. Moving to a consolidated financial platform while eliminating paper-based processes will drive immediate benefits for your company including timely reporting and improved receivables in addition to mitigating your fraud probability. Adding proper controls and being vigilant about monitoring your financial statements reduces the chance of your company becoming a victim of fraud.
Technology – We implement our best in breed enterprise accounting software which eliminates the need for using non-integrated solutions like small business financial software or spreadsheets. This single source of truth offers dashboards that give you an at-a-glance understanding of where your business is at – and where it’s going. Every dashboard has a clear financial narrative, so you have information that is immediate and easy to understand.
· “Consero allowed me to implement a scalable financial platform to support our growing operations in dramatically less time than doing it in-house while allowing me to stay focused on other critical objectives.”
“Consero’s leadership was really ahead of the curve when it came to their response to COVID-19. They didn’t miss a beat. Nothing slipped or slowed down. That is important because our bank and investors, as well as our management team, couldn’t afford a loss of visibility into our performance during this challenging time.”
· “The change from in-house to outsourcing has transformed the current financial reality and future-outlook for ALPFA. With increased visibility into accounting information and financial changes that led to increased revenue, we are finally on sure footing.”
“Capital is very tight if you are a venture-backed company. When you are new, you may need a general-ledger accountant and AR and AP expertise, but you may not need them full time. And when cash is dear, and you’ve got a full-time head doing a 50% job, it’s painful. Consero can put in a 50% person until you grow into the need for a full-timer. “
“Now when I show up in the morning, I can think about the major initiatives of the business rather than spending time on reporting or checking on the daily operations of my group.”
