Future of finance

Transforming people and processes to drive performance excellence

The future of finance is now

Finance leaders play a pivotal role in helping their organizations navigate a changing business landscape. They’re balancing the need to generate insights to support the organization’s growth strategy with rising demands for efficiencies in how the finance function operates.

Striking this balance isn’t easy, but many chief financial officers (CFOs) are change agents who are planning to accelerate automation and new ways of working to tackle these challenges. But the executives they work with may not be seeing this. According to Harvard Business Review, while 83% of CFOs are happy with the finance function’s performance, only 44% of C level executives agree.

Watch our video to learn more about the future of finance.

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Canadian CFO insights

A roadmap for finance transformation as CFOs navigate a ‘perfect storm

Finance in 15 podcast

A PwC podcast to help you accelerate your finance transformation

Looking beyond for new approaches to change

Bridging this gap will require an integrated approach to enhancing the performance of the finance function. You might have invested in a new or upgraded enterprise resources planning (ERP) system, but are you getting the full value from it? You might be facing other structural issues that are holding your finance function back, whether from continued use of manual processes or the need for a more flexible operating model with the right people focused on the activities that matter most.

We offer a comprehensive approach to finance transformation that puts people first and includes helping finance functions move to the cloud, adopt automation and intelligent processes and free up capacity for a more insights-focused role. Wherever you’re at in your transformation journey, you can take comfort knowing we’ll be with you all the way. We work closely with you in small, efficient teams using a flexible process that focuses on rapid, incremental changes that deliver quick wins on the way to transformative results.

Define your focus across people, process and performance

We’ve developed an approach that’s tailored to your specific needs and addresses the key elements of finance transformation: people, process and performance. Wherever you begin, we’ll help you finish first with a more efficient finance function that leads the organization in value creation and performance excellence.

Watch the CFO Spotlight video to learn how PwC Canada took steps to automate and streamline manual and repetitive processes.

Learn more

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How we can help

Finance activity survey/benchmarking
Releasing capacity
Accelerate the close
Financial reporting/performance insights
Finance transformation enabled by technology
Capital and workforce planning
Planning, budgeting and forecasting
Finance transformation business case
Cloud finance

Finance activity survey/benchmarking

To accelerate your transformation journey, it’s important to get the full picture of the costs and time spent on your finance processes. We can help you compare your cost and performance metrics against leading companies to see where you have opportunities to create a more efficient and effective finance function.

Releasing capacity

Some companies’ finance functions find themselves dedicating significant resources to low-value tasks, many of which can be automated. But automation can’t fix broken processes, which often requires you to focus on simplifying them first. We can help you identify the right opportunities for simplifying and automating processes so you can fund change and investment across the finance function and free up resources for insights-focused activities. We also offer a range of outsourcing and co-sourcing solutions that help you accelerate automation and find efficiencies while also giving you access to our subject matter expertise.

Accelerate the close

Every day spent closing the books is one day less spent on analysis. We’ll help you standardize and automate the close management process while reducing effort through new risk-based policies. We also offer leading-edge solutions to tax, reporting, controls and other areas of compliance that will further accelerate your close.

Financial reporting/performance insights

Finance functions often find themselves tasked with creating a large volume of financial reporting that requires significant data manipulation and manual work and focuses more on the past than what’s happening now. We’ll help you rationalize your financial reporting and create a delivery model that lets your finance teams quickly pull data from the right sources so you can lead the business in planning for the future.

Finance transformation enabled by technology

Organizations need to upgrade to their ERP systems (e.g. SAP S/4HANA or Workday), but they want to avoid the challenges they’ve had with their past ERP implementations. With the right guidance on people, process and performance and the help of practice aids, tools, accelerators and model company frameworks, you can maximize the return on your investment. We’ll help you ensure a faster and smoother implementation of your new ERP SAP S4/HANA and build a team ready to deliver value to your business from your new ERP.

Capital and workforce planning

Increasing constraints on capital are making it more challenging for organizations to make key investment and planning decisions. By enhancing governance, processes and tools, organizations can improve planning for capital and workforce investments. This will help the organization maximize available working capital for its top priorities and support its strategic focus.

Planning, budgeting and forecasting

To see the full financial picture and accurately plan for the future, it’s important to streamline data collection, aggregation and analysis practices. Leading tools are available to automate many planning, budgeting and forecasting tasks, including consolidation of bottom-up budget and forecast plans. We can help you restructure roles and responsibilities to improve planning and consolidation and, ultimately, better align budgeting and forecasting processes with your organization’s strategic direction.

Finance transformation business case

To build leadership support for critical investments in transformation, you need to rethink how your finance function delivers services. It all starts with looking at the operating model to assess which finance services the organization needs most and the best ways to structure the finance function to deliver them. We can help you develop a road map for change that delivers the outcomes the business expects.

Cloud finance

In a changing business climate, many small- and medium-size business owners are looking to better understand and manage key areas of finance, including cash flow, key performance indicators, accounts payable and day-to-day accounting. More than ever, they need quality insights into how they can grow the business. A virtual outsourced accounting solution can help you refocus efforts on what matters most and translate your accounting data into powerful insights that can shape your future.