As the office of the SaaS company controller becomes ever more strategic—creating higher levels of financial visibility to help drive growth and profitability—the financial organisation’s relationship to the controller role must evolve as well. Specifically: Today’s CFO needs to work side by side with the controller to ensure that, one, the organisation gets all the benefit of the controller’s talents and knowledge and, two, the controller’s office is operating at the highest levels of efficiency and accuracy. Ask your controller the following five questions to initiate the vital conversation around best practices.
Q1 How many manual journal entries are we making during the closing process?
Q2 Have you reviewed compliance with local jurisdictions?
Q3 How long does it take to close our books? What’s holding things up?
Q4 Are we still using Excel? If so, why?
Q5 Can we integrate our financial information and our operating metrics?
Exploring the answers to these five questions with your controller will help create a stronger, more effective financial structure. In fact, your entire organisation will benefit from a finance team that understands and controls sources of financial risk, implements more efficient processes, and develops deeper insight into both the financial and operational metrics of the business to drive better decision making, better informed board meetings, and better executed strategy.
For more tips to optimise workflows with cloud-based accounting software contact our Akuna Solutions Team. We will help you further.