The business intelligence solutions have passed a long time ago the infancy level. A quick internet search will show that the so called “business data… Read More »Simplicient Controlling 11 – The Future of Business Intelligence Solutions
Digitalisation – a persistent, recurring and turning inside-out demand from most of our customers. Not to be confounded with the bold strategy power-points used in… Read More »Simplicient Controlling 10 – Defining Digitalisation (Light-Hearted)
This Simplicient Controlling blog will focus on the merger of the financial and operational KPI performance measurement. More exactly, on the pro’s and con’s of… Read More »Simplicient Controlling 9 – Financial vs. Operational KPIs – A Case for Merging Them
Controllers are number crunchers – aren‘t they? A controller is the person who comes to you with a long table, filled with numbers, and uses a red pen to highlight differences.
Unfortunately, not anymore. Business or sparring partner (a term used often in recruiting finance managers) means more than that. To be brutally honest, C-level managers rarely care how much time spent a controller crunching the data and coming up with a deviation analysis. But the C-level bosses will very quickly (matter of minutes) point to a graph bar and mention that there is a problem… Well, I guess in most cases the controller did not spot the issue and needs to follow up. And this re-iteration process goes on and on… tiring up the financial wizards.Read More »Simplicient Controlling 8 – Number-Cruncher or Sparring Partner?
Back in September 2014, doitinvest.com published a researched white paper on the perfect profile of a Chief Financial Officer (in Central & Eastern Europe). It was quite well received, so I decided to revisit the topic today in this blog post, with more general notes.
After browsing several articles (see bottom for sources) on the CFO job profiles, I found quite interesting conclusions, even if you are not a boring finance professional trying to make his/her way to the top. Whilst reading them, I had two major surprises:
– The articles on the topic were few and far in between, and quite old (we are in 2014, they were from 2007-2010, when probably the enthusiasm and the PR needed to recruit high-caliber professionals for CFO jobs were substantially higher);
– Surprise surprise – despite their aging, the CFO blogs had some interesting insights which are still valid so far.
What were the key findings of these headhunter blogs related to the ideal CFO?:
– CFO’s need to have superior technical finance knowledge, especially related to the complexity of accounting standards, fiscal requirements, M&A’s and financial analysis (the Western Europe CFO’s who deal with much fewer and more developed countries need paradoxically less of such technical skills);
– Communication skills are highly valued for the senior financial leaders, especially in the emerging markets & fast changing sectors such as industry, tech, pharma, IT;Read More »Simplicient Controlling 7 – The CFO Profile to Fall in Love With
How to clearly present your company’s financial performance? I am pretty sure that this question creates a lot of frustrations and discussions for various controllers,… Read More »Simplicient Controlling 6 – Financial Performance Clearly Presented
Systemic sales analysis requires many skills: financial extrapolation know-how, business sector knowledge etc. A controller without time series regression analysis is regarded nowadays by CFOs… Read More »Simplicient Controlling 5 – Why Is Sales Analysis so Difficult?