The CFO in Crisis Mode: modern times call for new tools

Esteemed venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) outlined a call for new tools to built for the office of the CFO, after decades of complacency by the two monopolies that sit at the core of the CFOs office - the accounting ledger and ERP.

New times call for new tools.  With help from early Puzzle advisor Sharon Olexy, a16z came up with a few key insights we agree with:

They created a really interesting hierarchy of needs for the new CFO. In the current economic crisis, businesses have been forced to make difficult decisions around resource allocation and cash flow planning. The person most critical in helping the CEO make those high-stakes calls—the CFO—is more vital than ever. Over the years, the CFO role has become highly strategic. Yet despite an influx of data on which to base business decisions, the tools at the CFO’s disposal have not kept pace. Accounting reporting has transformed to headcount planning, cash flow analysis, resource allocation and heavy involvement in sales and revenue prediction.

source: https://a16z.com/2020/04/15/new-cfo-tools/

There are modern players all surrounding a 30 year piece of core software:

source: https://a16z.com/2020/04/15/new-cfo-tools/

What ends up happening is output becomes data is stale, limited or hard to access.  Manual journal entries and reconciliations consume almost all the month, but expectations of the CFO are growing.

A16Z predicts 4 big opportunities:

1. Intelligent building blocks
2. Integrated data layer
3. Banking operations
4. Automated data entry and reporting

We are excited to attack #1, #2 and #4, and parter with industry layers tackling #3.

Read more here.

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