CFO software stacks – and how to improve yours

CFO Software Stack

CFO software stacks – and how to improve yours

Don't let the wrong tools derail your business

Whether you’re just starting out as a CFO or speaking from years of experience, you’ll know how important it is to curate the right software stack. Choose the right tools, and you can create a streamlined process that allows you to reduce costs and boost efficiency in just a few clicks. But choose wrong, and you can easily find yourself overwhelmed by data, spending hours trying to track down relevant statistics within a sea of information.

Not so long ago, the main responsibilities of a CFO would have been focused on the nitty-gritty of financial management. But as technology has allowed us to automate more and more of these administrative tasks, that role has shifted. Now, a CFO might be responsible for anything from pioneering new strategies to managing growth. In other words, it’s a big job — but one that can be made easier with the right tech.

The first step to choosing the right software stack is to figure out exactly what you need. Small start-up CFOs, for example, will have a specific set of software requirements — and they might look very different to the stack used by the CFO of a growth-stage company.

Generally speaking, start-ups don’t require much — although a decent piece of accounting software should be in every CFO’s toolkit from the very beginning. To access your data from anywhere — and ensure easy sharing at the click of a button — a cloud-based solution such as FreshBooks or Xero is probably the best choice.

Once past the start-up stage, CFOs might want to consider software that deals with payroll and HR. The goal is to streamline the process while remaining in touch with your employees, so go for an intuitive, transparent platform such as Gusto or BrightPay.

Next, we move on to another cornerstone of the CFO’s stack: Enterprise Resource Planning systems, or ERPs. This software allows companies to easily manage day-to-day activities, and can encompass anything from accounting to project management, compliance, procurement, and more. And the system you choose will depend heavily on the focus of your organisation. For many businesses, NetSuite serves as a good all-rounder, while Unit4 offers a high level of personalisation that’s popular with charities and nonprofits.

ERPs, though, can only do so much — and many CFOs like to add financial planning and analysis platforms to their stack as well. With collaborative tools such as Abacum, you can automate certain tasks and analyses, making it easier to predict the future of your business. Similarly, a spend management solution will help you keep track of corporate spending, allowing you to easily incorporate all expenses into your overviews and predictions.

In other words, there are lots of different elements that make up the perfect CFO software stack — and only you can decide what’s right for your company.

But whether you’re a small, independent business or a high-growth company on your way to the top, it’s worth taking a look at what our sister company Projected has to offer. Ideal for busy CFOs who sometimes struggle to find the data that they’re looking for amongst various complex platforms, Projected has built a tool to analyse your KPIs, delivering all the essential data direct to your inbox. So if you want to make informed decisions about your company’s future — and plan for growth in a sustainable and productive way — speak to the Projected team about the essential tool that can transform your software stack.

Find out more about Projected

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What does a start-up CFO do?

Photo by Lukas Bato on Unsplash

So what does a start-up CFO do?

We get asked this a lot so we asked our CFO's about the day-to-day and the strategic value they impart.

The perception and reality of start-up CFO’s and finance, in general, are somewhat at odds. With this in mind, we thought shining a light on what a good start-up CFO actually does. Because guess what, it’s probably a world away from what you think. Or at least we hope this article will start to question your perception.

We think a good start-up CFO is a key driver to successful growth and we hope by the end of this article you do too.

What's most important?

There are a lot of different opinions out there so we asked our team of start-up CFO’s what they thought. Luckily 😉 everyone was aligned around the same 5 constants:

  1. Experience
  2. Shape culture
  3. Know how, and most importantly where to raise money
  4. Process and structure
  5. They drive growth and look forward
Grouped together they’re a recipe for growth and success, here’s why.

Why experience matters?

Photo by zhang kaiyv on Unsplash

But we’re doing something new?

There’s somewhat of a sub-culture that doesn’t value experience in the start-up world. At least on the face of anyway. Young teams doing new and interesting things in areas that haven’t been explored before. But, don’t be fooled into thinking experience isn’t vital. A seasoned CFO brings trust internally and externally which is immensely valuable. Investors like experience they trust in it, staff trust in experience, especially in a growing company where the prospect of failure is exponentially higher than a cushy job at Google. It makes people feel confident in the founders and the goals.

Helping shape the culture

Photo by Timon Klauser on Unsplash

Expensive espresso machine, check. Fusball table, check. 

Sadly things don’t make culture. A good start-up CFO can. Too often culture or the veneer of culture is attempted of the back off a fridge full of drinks and other assorted perks. Unfortunately, we’ve seen how a search (pun intended) under the surface uncovers something far less palatable.

A good start-up CFO, with experience, can help shape the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of the company. That’s where culture is created and it’s down to the c-suite to set that agenda.

How and where to raise money

Photo by Darío Martínez-Batlle on Unsplash

We’ll just do a crowdfund!

If only it were so simple? In most cases, you’ll probably be bringing a start-up CFO onboard post an initial seed round or at least your friends and family raise. Just think back on every step you went through during that period, how much time did you spend? 

A start-up CFO, who’s been through multiple raises, will have a very clear idea of how you should raise money and where to go to get it. And it’s important because raising money can be one of the biggest time sucks for founding teams taking them away from the business of growing.

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Process and structure

Photo by Aaron Santelices on Unsplash

Look at our shiny Trello board!

So we’re not suggesting Trello isn’t useful, let’s be very clear. But very often the process, internal and external reporting that worked at the early stage isn’t robust enough as you grow. A good start-up CFO can shape the right process and build out a structure that will work for where you are and where you’re going.

Robust process and structure are a clear sign your no longer a start-up, you’re a growing company.

Driving growth and looking to the future

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Finance is an internal thing, right?

The biggest perception we like to bust. A good start-up CFO busts this myth right out of the water. Inwards and backward-looking isn’t right for a growth company, sure reports do need to be created but our start-up CFO’s are all about forwards and outwards. Looking ahead to, and uncovering, opportunities to grow. This is the real value, it’s not just about taking care of the numbers it’s about playing a key role in the direction of the business. 

 

We hope this has started to paint a different picture of what a start-up CFO brings to the table. We think it’s a lot, we think a good one will help achieve the vision that founders have.

Good Luck!

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Riding solo as an accountant in tech

Guest Expert - Riding solo as an accountant in tech

Rob Collings tells us what it's like to be the only accountant in a start-up

Being the only accountant in a company can be an amazing experience. It can be an incredible learning curve with the opportunity to really broaden your skill set. Anything finance related comes across your desk which means you get the opportunity to deal with such a wide range of things.

But, it can also be daunting. What if you don’t know the answer? What if you make a mistake? Does it mean you have to do everything?

In this article I will attempt to explain some of these questions and help you understand what it’s like to ride solo as an accountant in a tech company.

Setting the scene

Generally speaking, if you’re the only accountant in the company it probably means you’re at a relatively early stage startup. We’re talking about tens of employees, perhaps between seed and Series A/B and still feeling very ‘startup’ culturally.

Other business departments, such as legal, HR and compliance are probably in a similar boat as finance – one person running the show in each area. A very flat structure.

The job role

Being the only person in the finance team, you’ll get to see a wide range of things. From strategic decisions that impact the overall direction of the business to BAU (business as usual) tasks which help keep the cogs turning.

It’s an exciting space to be as you naturally build up a great understanding of the organisation simply by virtue of everything you see. You learn what moves the needle and what doesn’t, and that’s important because, as a finance person, you need to understand what’s going on across the whole business so you can help glue the business together financially.

Riding solo doesn’t mean you can’t delegate

Whilst you may be the only accountant, that doesn’t mean you’re on your own. I would highly recommend using an external accountant for the BAU activities (bookkeeping) whilst it’s economically viable. BAU tasks are the things that keep the cogs moving, so it’s not necessarily the most valuable use of your time.

Your company may also have someone who is happy to get stuck into anything and everything. You can leverage their availability by asking them to take care of the more mechanical tasks such as invoicing, loading bank payments and dealing with supplier/customer queries.

You’ll still need to have good control over this side of things though, so it’s often impossible to completely delegate the BAU activities. I like to watch out for errors or bottlenecks because they indicate a breakdown in a process somewhere, then fix it.

Moving the needle

The strategic tasks are where you’ll probably find that you spend more of your time. Strategic work covers a wide range of things which typically vary day to day, but in my opinion include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Build or review financial models that help map out the journey from here to there
  • Projecting cash runway and putting in plans to raise finance
  • Building relationships with key stakeholders
  • Process improvements to make things effective and scalable
  • Assessing the ROI / financial impact of strategic investments

For this type of thing, it’s helpful to know a few other CFO’s / Head of Finance’s to bounce ideas off. You’ll probably find that at least one of your founders has a good understanding of the financial strategy side so they can be useful to brainstorm with – and if not, I always find it’s useful to run ideas past non-accountants as they often have a different viewpoint. The key is to be open minded!

What if you don’t know the answer?

Surprisingly (or not!), lots of questions can be answered by a quick google search. It might not throw up the perfect answer, but could give you some ideas that send you in the right direction.

Think about pricing strategy for example – a quick google search will throw up lots of information on how other companies price their products, different structures and why things are priced in certain ways. It won’t tell you how to price your product, but it’ll give you ideas!

You can then refine those ideas by speaking with other people in the company. If you’re working at a startup, there’s a fair chance that many of your colleagues are incredibly smart, so use them well!

It’s also a good idea to build up your network to include other finance professionals who can help with the more generic questions. Don’t forget you’ll also have access to your external accountants.

And if something goes wrong?

If you get something wrong, the key skill is being able to fix it. Most decisions aren’t irreversible. They might be hard to fix, but not impossible. Everyone is human so making mistakes is a natural trait, but managing the mistakes properly is what differentiates you from others.

Overall, working as the only accountant in a company is an excellent way to progress your career and gain a unique skill set that makes you a more all-rounded professional. It can be scary at first, but turn that fear into excitement and you’ll have a great time!

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Meet the finance pro – Joe Newbold

Meet the finance pro - Joe Newbold

Financial controller Joe has been a key member of the EmergeONE team of finance pro's over the last year.

EmergeONE is built on a roster of amazing finance pro’s. People are the cornerstone of the finance stacks we build for growth companies so we thought it only fitting that we’d introduce that team. First up is Joe Newbold, Joe’s been working with some amazing growth companies over the last year and this week we interviewed him.

 

 

 

Hi Joe, tell us about you?

 

I started out as an accountant pretty young in practice, as most do. Then went through to my first role in industry which was with a tech firm of only 20 to 25 people in size, it was VC backed and that position excited me at the time because coming out of practice, it felt like I could add value and really do something that an external adviser can’t do for a business and then it went on from there really. I went through a number of companies that were high growth, some of them often doubling in turnover every year. But I had a distinct gap in my CV for larger company experience when it comes to technical reporting and IFRS so I took the plunge to go back into practice for a couple of years, and then came out and ventured into a few FTSE 100s for about 18 months or so. 

 

All of those roles were only ever contract positions and that space is what interested me rather than trying to stay on as a permanent employee, where you often feel trapped in a position if you’re on three months notice or you’re not able to make the impact that you feel you can make because you need to go through a very large decision making tree. 

 

It was at this point that I was presented with the opportunity to be a portfolio financial controller with EmergeONE, I jumped at the chance. It was new for me and it was new for the people I was working with. And one of the things that really excites me about this is you are in a position both as a contractor, as a financial controller, and as a portfolio FC, to make quick decisions that impact a business almost immediately. You often have that level of authority and say, whether it comes to bid processes, whether it comes to forecasting, cash flow, what to spend money on, know what customers to sell to or whether to turn down sales because of margin. 

 

When you’re looking at systems and automation, you can get involved in absolutely every single part of the business. And that’s basically why I do it, it’s much more rewarding than having that full time position, or the position in a larger business where you’re not able to make the changes that you really feel you should be able to make.

 

So it’s not just about your personal freedom it’s about the impact you have?

 

Yeah, absolutely. But it doesn’t come without its drawbacks. FM or FC level is very different to being a portfolio FD. An FD is in the position where they’re not always expected to get their hands dirty, and they’re often there for specific strategic advice. 

 

Whether or not to raise capital or taking the company through a growth period, or being an ear to the CEO or the MD or whatever. In those positions you can do one or two days a week and potentially switch off. With the FC and FM positions, even if you’re not there, you’re still there. Because there’s questions around invoices. There’s questions why a new system launches and isn’t working. There’s questions why an API link has suddenly broken. So it’s not just as easy as saying I will do two days a week for two clients. It is five days a week for every client. And that’s the only thing I would say as my word of advice or caution for anyone wanting to be a portfolio FC, in that there’s always something to do for every client every day of the week.

 

Does that put pressure on you to manage those expectations?

 

You can have back to back conference calls all day for four or five hours. And you’ll switch from client A to client B to client C, back to client A and then again to client B, and it is literally being able to turn it on and off immediately. And then at 5 or 6pm do work for all three clients ready for the next couple of days. So don’t get me wrong, every day can be a 16 hour day and when it’s busy, it’s really busy.

 

How do you ensure successful outcomes for the companies you work with?

 

Ensuring success is massively about stakeholder management. Every time somebody asks for something, ask them when they want it back. In a permanent position, people who work for a big company, people ask for something, they think they want it there and then. Often they don’t need it though. Smaller companies, unless it’s really critical, because founders and MD’s are normally aware that they’re so busy, the timelines are often more realistic. 

 

So it’s very much about asking what people want and when they want it. And if people ask for something don’t just assume that’s what they want. Often, business founders and entrepreneurs they’re not necessarily financial and they’re not operational or systems experts. So when somebody asks for something, make sure you ask the right questions to elicit that the information they’re asking for is representative of the task or the solution that they are after.

 

That’s a hard balance, giving people what they need and want aren’t always the same?

 

Sometimes I’ve been asked questions where the CEO might think it’s three hours work. And after a telephone conversation, a 10 minute chat, that was it, it was over. I didn’t even have to do anything. So you don’t necessarily need the detail, all the way through the chain, if D is always fixed as point D, then actually, you know, by virtue A, B and C are going to be roughly right. So rather than checking the whole value chain, or whatever it may be, so often it’s about just managing those things. I always say also being in a portfolio position, it’s very easy to get used to emails as everybody does now, or IMs. It’s far more efficient to pick up the phone and ring all three or four clients every day for 10 minutes and ask them if they need anything. So you can then start to plan two or three days ahead. Often, if I ring somebody on a Monday or Tuesday, ask them if they’re okay. See if they want anything. They say no, I’m left alone till Friday.

 

 

Beyond the founders how do you integrate with the in-house team, especially in the current working environment?

 

So some of the companies I’m working with are completely remote. And those that are completely remote, I make sure that I place far more emphasis on calling people and arranging more frequent video calls than I would normally. Those clients where I am now remote but I used to work with a team in the office I still make the effort to ring people rather than just emailing them. For me ringing people is a far more efficient working pattern than solely relying on responses to emails and trying to manage things that way.

 

Tell us a bit more about the timing, when are you typically brought into a business?

 

 

It’s been a real mixture and the roles are varied. There are proactive, firefighting or hold the fort roils. Where somebody realises that the company is going to grow bigger and they want finance to come in and make sure things don’t break. That’s rare. I would say, particularly in the SME or high growth sector, finance is seen as a cost, it’s not a revenue generator. 

 

If you’re small, and the business is only five or six people, often the CEO knows where they’re spending money. So you can’t really save any money. The only thing you could do is improve efficiencies where there is a massive opportunity cost for everybody else in the business to do what they’re specialists at. 

 

But generally speaking, that’s rare within a startup or high growth business. The firefighting is more common. In my experience, businesses finances tend to creek around 2.5million to 10million. And then somewhere between 15 and 20 because the previous set of processes isn’t able to scale with the current operations, and the volume the business is churning. 

 

Don’t get me wrong if it’s one massive contract win at 10 million pounds, that’s different. But if you’re looking at, generally speaking the same business model, there are rough points when you may get bought in either to aid what was an FM in there in the first place or an FC who has been with a business for a number of years. 

 

Or you’ve been bought in and previously they’ve had a part time bookkeeper or something like that. That’s more common. And then there’s a whole before position where an incumbent has left and you may just be asked to come in for three or four months, change a few things but not change very much until they find the next person. 

 

Sometimes they don’t find somebody and sometimes you’re able to make changes so quickly that they’ve decided, in fact, the contract or portfolio FC works quite well for them and they keep you on. But there is always a risk that if you’re only doing two or three days a week, then as the company grows, they can outgrow you. And they will need someone full time. And unless you’re willing to be that person, then effectively you lose that revenue stream and you have to go and backfill it with another client.

 

  

What would you say the difference is between contracting and portfolio? What advice would you give to someone who’s thinking about going into or starting a portfolio career?

   

For both portfolio and contracting you have the same very small length of time to become familiar with the business, but contracting is typically for a fixed term whereas portfolio can be very open ended. As a permanent employee you may get given grace for two or three months to learn the ins and outs. If you’re going to be a good contract or good portfolio, I reckon you’ve got about 14 days. Prove that you can learn the business inside out and show that you can make a difference. I think you’ve only got that length of time, because by then somebody could have paid you what can seem like a steep day rate. And if you’re not on the scale, and there’s somebody else out in the market then it’s very easy to to replace you with only a week’s notice. Being a portfolio FC, sometimes you might only have a matter of days to get used to a business and start making changes because they expect immediate impacts in in that kind of position and you know there’s always a heavier workload towards the start of any assignment whether it be contracting or portfolio and once you’ve put the graft in your job can be as easy or as hard as as you’ve made it really.

 

In my mind the most important aspect is ensuring I have what I need to drive success? When you go in to a business what do I need from from those around me to make sure I can deliver. IT’s the exact opposite to what you get in a large business and that you can make decisions in a large business within a very small set of parameters. I think within a smaller company, you need the authority to be able to tell people whether they can or can’t do something. And also, how much money you have in order to make the changes you need to make. And then you’re allowed to go away and do it within a certain remit. 

The majority of the instances that I’ve had, as long as you don’t break anything that currently works well, then everything else you can do what you need to do to make sure that the finances and the operations and the business doesn’t fail.



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