The following is a guest post from Sumit Johar, chief information officer at BlackLine. Opinions are the author’s own.
As the holiday season approaches, businesses face not only the usual challenges of increasing cash flow and meeting year-end financial goals but also the rising risks of IT disruptions. High-profile incidents like Seattle’s airport disruption and the CrowdStrike outage remind us that IT continuity risks can be just as impactful as weather-related issues during this critical time. This period is particularly stressful for CFOs, who are responsible for ensuring a seamless financial close amid the chaos of holiday operations.
As CFOs know, the stakes are high during this period. The end of the year demands precision in reporting, transparency in audits and the assurance systems work harmoniously to maintain operational continuity. In my role as CIO, I’ve collaborated closely with the CFO to elevate financial operations systems innovation and help optimize record-to-report and invoice-to-cash processes.
During this collaboration, I’ve compiled the biggest challenges faced by teams responsible for financial operations systems this season and successful strategies to safeguard CFOs’ year-end close operations during the busy holiday season.
IT’s crucial role in year-end close
Closing the books accurately and efficiently is generally meticulous, especially in larger organizations with siloed systems and manual processes. The volume of data across departments, coupled with fragmented systems, increases the risk of errors. During year-end close, this pressure intensifies as CFOs face heightened scrutiny from third-party audits and the demand for reliable, accurate reporting.
The holiday season brings unique challenges as enterprises finalize projects from Q3 and plan for the upcoming year. With the Q4 rush comes increased buying activity and a spike in transactions. Both IT and finance teams need to be prepared to manage the workload, ensuring operational continuity while integrating new tools and systems to start the new year on a strong footing.
Streamlining finance operations for business continuity
The key to navigating the holiday season is having streamlined and optimized IT systems that provide visibility and reduce disruptions. Here’s how CFOs can work with their CIOs to achieve this:
- Monitoring operational metrics: CFOs can work with their CIOs to conduct weekly reviews of key operating metrics that can offer critical insights into their finance teams’ system behavior. Identifying trends early can highlight potential risks, enabling organizations to take proactive measures to avoid disruptions.
- Planning for personnel and transaction volume: These two enterprise leaders must proactively anticipate spikes in transaction volume and ensure adequate staffing. From extended support to personnel on-call, advanced planning is essential for maintaining smooth operations. Additionally, enterprises must evaluate infrastructure capacity to handle increased traffic during the holiday season.
- Investing in failover systems — resilience is crucial: When investing in software, CFOs can work closely with their CIOs to ensure failover plans are in place and vet their vendors to confirm they’re using best-in-class systems. Modernizing their financial systems — moving away from legacy systems to newer, cloud-based and AI-powered solutions — can reduce the risk of downtime during the holiday rush.
Optimizing revenue processes to meet year-end goals
For CFOs, optimizing revenue processes while maintaining operational continuity is critical during year-end close. There are a couple of strategies including enhancing employee productivity and leveraging data and automation that can help finance teams achieve this goal.
Distractions during the busy season can hurt the tracking and analyzing of a company’s revenue streams. This challenges the accuracy of financial statements. Enterprises can optimize productivity by providing finance teams with the right tools and data at the right time, allowing them to optimize time and effectiveness while closing the books.
AI-driven data analysis can offer real-time insights, making it easier to process unstructured data and find actionable insights that were previously difficult to extract. By integrating AI into data strategies, CFOs can streamline reporting and gain deeper insights into financial performance.
The crucial role of the CIO/CFO relationship
As data volumes explode and tasks become more complex for CFOs, who better than a CIO to partner with? Manual processes are no longer sustainable, and the right technology, implemented thoughtfully, is essential for running finance operations efficiently.
CFOs and CIOs must work in lockstep, ensuring that their respective strategies align. While CFOs focus on driving financial strategy and making the right investments, CIOs are responsible for ensuring the technology in place supports these goals. After all, in today’s digital world, a financial operation is only as good as the technology behind it.
