Accountant Perspectives on Financial Transformation: Bridging the Gap Between Vision and Execution

About the Author: Katie Thomas, CPA, is a content creator, 2021 & 2022 40 under 40 CPA Practice Advisor recipient, Top 50 Women in Accounting recipient, and the owner of Leaders Online, where they help accounting professionals increase their impact, influence, and income through thought leadership and digital marketing. Feel free to visit Leaders Online or connect with her on LinkedIn to get in touch with Katie.

As the saying goes, the only thing constant in life is change, and that’s no different for organizations. 

As organizations grow and evolve today, they must embrace change and undertake initiatives that will lead them into the future. However, there's a critical gap that exists between this desire for transformation and the execution of meaningful changes. 

Accountants, who are often at the forefront of these financial shifts, are aware of financial transformation—or 90% are, according to FloQast’s recent survey. However, being aware of the term is different from truly understanding the specifics and how to implement them effectively.

Bridging the gap between vision and execution is essential for viable transformation to occur, enabling organizations to move from fragmented efforts to a cohesive strategy that drives sustainable growth and operational excellence.

So how can organizations bridge this gap? 

First, accounting departments must understand what financial transformation really entails. This journey continues with the transformation of accounting processes, which drives financial transformation as a larger concept. Streamlining and modernizing accounting systems lay the foundation for broader financial innovations that can propel organizations toward their growth goals. With accounting departments at the forefront of these changes, understanding the components of financial transformation becomes critical.

What is Financial Transformation?

What do organizations always want to do?

• Boost productivity
• Modernize processes
• Improve decision-making

All of this is part of financial transformation. At its core, it is an approach to reshaping and modernizing financial processes. Along the way, company culture is enhanced, and the company's vision is supported.

The reportWe’ve established that 90% of accountants know what financial transformation is, but reaching it is challenging when less than 50% of accountants understand the specifics.

CFOs are 2.2 times more likely to know the ins and outs of financial transformation, which creates a significant gap for organizations that want true transformation. 

This begs the question, can’t you just educate accountants on financial transformation?

Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. While education helps, other challenges need to be addressed before transformation can be achieved, and understanding the accountant's perspective is a good starting place.

The Accountant’s View: Finding Challenges and Opportunities

Accountants are busy. High workloads, complex tasks, data quality, and accessibility are just some of the challenges today’s accountant often faces. One thing I routinely hear from colleagues working in accounting departments is that data isn’t easy to manage or make meaningful and actionable.

Technology is a game-changer in this department. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) tools can help accountants process and interpret large volumes of data, turning it into valuable insights that can drive organizational success.

That being said, even with the advantages technology offers, no application is a silver bullet to solving all challenges. 

Each challenge must be approached in a logical, consistent manner. Big data has long been difficult to dissect, but it’s just one piece of a larger transformation puzzle.

Addressing certain challenges will help accelerate transformation, but the ones an organization chooses to solve must be viewed as legitimate problems by those on the front lines.

The challenges frequently mentioned by accountants today—and this can change in the future—need to be at the top of the list before transformation can occur.

The Key Challenges

According to accountants, the key challenges to achieving financial transformation are:

• Communication limitations. Accountants know what works and what doesn’t. Often, they find clever fixes to get around technology and process limitations. The better they are at coming up with fixes, the less the CFO feels the need to push for transformation. To illustrate this point, I was speaking to a friend who is a controller at a family office. She shared that she takes advanced Excel courses on the side just so she can manipulate the data into more usable formats.
• Data visibility. For accountants, data silos are a common problem. Lack of data visibility can hinder an accountant’s ability to do their job. My controller friend explained that, often, they are given just one piece of the puzzle and have to track down the rest. A big part of the problem for her team is that people are using different software, even for communication and project management. A centralized data system that aggregates information could help solve this problem.
• Manual efforts. Accountants spend an excessive amount of time on manual data processes. AI and automation can help free up more time for valuable, strategic activities that can drive true financial transformation.

Understanding the key challenges of achieving financial transformation is an important first step, but it’s equally important to understand the accountant’s perception of the ability to transform.

The Accountant’s Perception of the Ability to Transform

If you haven’t read through the survey yet (read it here), it’s insightful to say the least. Reading through the details, you’ll find how accountants perceive their ability to drive financial transformation.

What was found, we’ll call it the “accountant’s perspective,” is that accountants believe CFOs are:

• Better suited at identifying what works and what doesn’t work with technology.
• Less suited than accountants when it comes to knowing the “must-have” or “nice-to-have” features of the technology and tools an organization uses.

Accountants use the technology that CFOs recommend in their day-to-day work, allowing them to have a unique insight into the inner workings of tech and the workarounds they have to use to “get it to work.”

CFOs can benefit from encouraging accountants to share the limitations of technology, what it needs to do and which features will be most useful.

Understanding the accountant’s perspective is important, which brings us to our next question of: how do we bridge the gap with CFOs? Let’s find out.

Bridging the Gap with CFOs

With all of this in mind, it’s clear that to achieve effective financial transformation, teams must take a collaborative approach. 

CFOs must work together with accountants to:

• Recognize the need for change. Transformation cannot happen unless accountants and CFOs recognize that something needs to change. Otherwise, accountants will continue to find workarounds to solve problems.
• Plan for changes. Developing use cases is a great start, but there must be a plan for choosing and adopting the right technology.
• Implement changes strategically. A strategy must be in place to execute the transformation effectively and ensure that accountants successfully adopt new technologies or processes.
• Utilize holistic technology solutions: Leverage a holistic set of technology that works together to drive accounting success throughout every stage of the journey, rather than using point solutions that create challenges such as unnecessary manual labor, data silos, and more. This allows for seamless collaboration and real-time insights into financial performance, fostering a stronger, more collaborative relationship.

But, CFOs must emphasize collaboration and bring all team members into the fold with:

• Joint Planning Sessions: CFOs and accountants should meet regularly to ensure that strategic initiatives are aligned with operational realities.
• Clear Communication Channels: By establishing clear communication channels, accountants can provide feedback to CFOs on what’s working and not working. CFOs can also ensure they’re taking the steps to create change where needed.
• Training and Education: Continuous training empowers accountants to adopt and maximize the benefits of any new technologies and processes the team implements. Accountants should actively participate in training sessions to ensure they use these new tools effectively.

The key to successful financial transformation is ensuring that CFOs and accountants constantly communicate, work together towards a common goal, and utilize technology that supports them and the organization throughout the entire accounting journey 

Closing Thoughts

Financial transformation offers a wealth of benefits, from increased efficiency to cost savings and better productivity.

But getting to the finish line will be an uphill battle if CFOs and accountants aren’t on the same page. 

Using the strategies above, teams can effectively collaborate to achieve their shared goal of true financial transformation.