Strategic Finance: A Guide for High-Growth Companies

1. Strategic Finance: A Guide for High-Growth Companies

2. Finance professionals spend upwards of 80% of their time on a broad base of transactional tasks necessary to keep businesses up and running. When so much effort is spent on these low value tasks, it doesn’t leave you with much time to consider important strategic and operational decisions that could improve business performance. Building a strategic finance function flips the paradigm of traditional corporate finance on its head by leveraging the latest technology to free up time spent on low value, backward-looking tasks, so you can identify (and follow through on) opportunities to guide your business into the future.

3. What Is Strategic Finance? Strategic finance is a way to turn the historically complex and siloed finance function into a clear, connected, and collaborative department—one that keeps a finger on the pulse of the business at all times while uniting departments and aligning them around the future. A strategic finance team operates at the intersection of all data flows and departments in and around the business. They use this vantage point to make a good company great. Strategic finance is your ability to translate operational data from across the business into sound financial insights in real time. That’s what ensures you always have a finger on the pulse of the business. And it’s what gives you a foundation for financial analysis that drives forward-looking strategic decision-making.

4. FP&A vs. Strategic Finance FP&A helped traditional CFOs and finance professionals elevate their statuses from backward-looking scorekeepers to advisers in corporate development. But in today’s SaaS-driven world, FP&A hasn’t been able to keep up with the complexities of new systems, new metrics, and interconnected business functions.

6. Strategic finance is what helps you break through these complexities and take a more prominent, forward-looking role in the business thanks to: ● Unified data from all areas of the business ● Forward-looking insights based on real-time data ● Connected platforms that act as intelligent building blocks for financial models ● The ability to accelerate business decision-making ● A focus on packaging financial data in a way the whole business can understand

7. The Benefit of Strategic Finance for Growing Companies The overarching benefit of strategic finance is that it enables the entire business to make smarter decisions about its future. When the finance function spends the majority of its time looking forward instead of backward, it can provide strategic advice on challenges that are deeply rooted in the company’s operations and economics. A more strategic philosophy gets your top finance talent out of the waiting game—waiting for last month’s numbers to come in, waiting to rebuild spreadsheets, and waiting to tell stakeholders what happened in the past. Instead, your strategic finance function gets ahead of the curve to advise on critical business decisions.

8. Andreesen Horowitz’s Seema Amble and Angela Strange used this pyramid to show that the typical CFO and their finance team aren’t able to focus on forward-looking tasks:

9. The Tool That Powers a Strategic Finance Function Normally, CFOs have to cobble together many tools to power their function. They use a host of point solutions for daily operations, an ETL tool to pipe that data into a database, a business intelligence (BI) tool for visualizations, and a financial planning tool for forecasting. Mosaic Finance is an all-in-one strategic finance platform that replaces this costly, complex tech stack. We built Mosaic so that strategic finance could be accessible for all companies. Mosaic integrates with your most important business systems—your ERP, CRM, HRIS, and payment systems—to enable real-time visibility into your financial data and automate many of the tasks that take time away from strategic finance.

11. There are two core components of Mosaic that help you take advantage of these integrations to power the strategic finance function: ● Mosaic Analytics: Automated analysis and visualizations based on real-time data help you prepare board materials, answer key business questions, and compare budgeting to actuals in seconds. ● Mosaic Planning: Flexible financial planning means you can easily manage your assumptions, model multiple scenarios, and create multiple predictive forecasts without spending countless hours fighting with spreadsheet-based financial models.

12. The Next Generation of Finance Is Strategic Everything your company does has financial implications—and it’s your job to translate those implications into actionable insights for the business. When all your business data automatically translates into clear and actionable insights, you don’t have to worry about connecting the dots day in and day out. You can focus on identifying strategic opportunities to maximize your growth rate and assume your place as a true adviser to the CEO.