Don’t Disregard Dashboards

April 16th, 2007 at 08:25am David Bush - Iasta

The recent issue of Business Finance has a great article on the importance of dashboards to the CFO and how you Disregard Dashboards at Your Peril. It states that The emergence of digital dashboards offers a new platform and opportunity for CFOs to redefine their value proposition for the enterprise and that the notion that CFOs can be champions for business performance — not just financial performance — is an important one.

The article states that CFOs need to take a leadership role in energetically developing and deploying dashboards enterprise-wide. Not only does decoupling and divorcing “financial management” from “business performance management” invariably lead to higher costs and lower efficiency for both, but dashboards represent a great way for CFO’s to get a grip on the company’s financials and help their organizations effectively manage cashflow.

For example, executives can be given an appropriately configured dashboard view into current sourcing projects with proposed payments and into current receivables and invoice due dates. In the latter case, this not only allows the CFO to ensure that all invoices are paid on time, and penalty-free, but to decide if payment should be made early to take advantage of appropriate discounts. In the former case, the CFO can make sure the procurement organization is using standard terms, or, if an exception is being made, that there is a financial benefit before the contract is signed.

As the article says, CFOs can be organizationally subordinate to this challenge, or they can drive it. Savvy CFOs who grasp that they must be business leaders more than financial overseers will treat these technologies as a transformational gift and help procurement select the right tools with the right dashboards that meets not only the requirements of procurement, but of finance and the organization as a whole as well.

And, if the prediction that the dashboard dynamic may well prove more important to business futures than the installation of ERP systems as business and financial platforms holds, the CFO really should be taking a leading role (and, when the CPO asks for such a system, play a part in the selection).

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Entry Filed under: Functionality, General, Technology