CFO Brew helps finance pros navigate their roles with insights into risk management, compliance, and strategy through our newsletter, virtual events, and digital guides.

CFO Brew

Drew Adamek

cfobrew.com

Mergers and acquisitions in 2023

For well-positioned companies, 2023 could be transformative for M&A dealmaking according to a new study.

The year ahead may be a good one for M&A

Kristen Talman

Finance has a lot of acronyms

A short refresher on the alphabet soup that governs the work of finance pros.

The acronyms of finance

business man in a suit holds gardening shears

Layoffs don't usually affect executives

Executives at companies doing layoffs and cutbacks largely don't comment on what may happen to their own salaries

Should executives share in the cost-cutting pain?

Growing stacks of coins on top of soil with plants growing out of the tops of them with chart trend line on top

Finance

Understanding history helps us navigate the future—and the history of finance is no exception. From the days of pen and paper to today’s AI tools, few job functions have transformed as much as finance. To prepare for the future, it’s important to understand how we got here and where today’s trends began.

, co-authored by senior finance leader Anders Liu-Lindberg et al., explores finance industry trends and examines how CFOs can use AI to make strategic, informed decisions. Learn more when you get the e-book.

How today’s trends can help CFOs make strategic decisions.

Graison Dangor

 and the Nasdaq correction, we’re all on extra-high alert for signs of consumer weakness. So when the New York Fed released its most recent look at household debt on August 6, we clicked on 

 so fast that we understood what it must have felt like trying to buy Taylor Swift tickets last year.

When we opened the report, what we saw was…not terrible, actually.

Household debt did increase “moderately” in the second quarter, according to the report, with a 0.6% jump from the previous quarter. That’s 4.3% higher than the same period in 2023. Looking at shorter intervals, quarter over quarter growth in household debt has been slowing since the end of 2023.

As the New York Fed’s sister branch in Kansas City pointed out in May, growing debt doesn’t spell trouble 

, and households’ low debt-to-income ratios are a sign that households aren’t taking on too much.

“Overall, there isn’t evidence of a retrenchment in consumer spending,” Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, told 

While the share of past-due debt (3.2%) was flat, rates of delinquency went up a little for mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards. The bank focused on “elevated” rates of delinquency for auto loans and credit cards—8% and 9.1% of the total, respectively. (Mortgage delinquencies are still “low by historic standards,” the report said.) The share of credit card bills more than 90 days late rose to 7.2% in June, compared to 5.1% in Q2 2023, while so-called serious delinquencies among auto loans ticked up a half-percentage point to 2.9%.

Household debt growth is slowing, but there are some red flags

Credit card and auto delinquencies are still high.

From technical nuances to risk management strategies, Currencycloud’s white paper is designed to help globally operating enterprises understand, implement, and generate revenue with foreign exchange (FX). Need help forecasting and optimizing your FX capabilities? You’ve come to the right guide.

CurrencyCloud

Foreign exchange (FX) for business, explained

Everything you need to know about financial automation operations and your business.

Step into the future of finance

Morning Brew Creative Studio

Picture this: enhanced cost control, cash flow that supports your future business goals, advanced talent retention strategies, simplified audits, and turbocharged productivity. Sounds incredible, doesn’t it? Welcome to the future of finance.

Financial automation promises to be a complete game changer for businesses small and large—if you do it right. We teamed up with BILL to clear the air on this new powerful tool, show you how to eliminate business headaches, and help you scale to new heights.

Here are five ways automation tools can benefit your biz:


1. Visibility: Financial automation gives you enhanced control over costs and superior cash-flow management.

Business owners can’t (and shouldn’t) ignore concerns like inflation and recession. These are tough, morale-crushing challenges that can affect your biz in all kinds of ways.

Fortunately, financial automation offers real-time viz into payables, receivables, spending, and expenses. Oh, and it can also help you set budgetary controls in case your employees go a little overboard with the company card 😉.

Periods of economic downturn call for better cash-flow management. When cash is tight, additional flexibility is crucial to ensuring an adequate flow of funds. Automating your cash-flow solutions allows direct control of outflows and inflows, giving you complete and constant viz into your current cash position, liabilities, and upcoming payments.

Financial automation can be an absolute powerhouse for boosting the performance of your finance team. For one, it streamlines pesky manual tasks like invoice entry, check writing, and reconciliation, helping to slash transaction times.

But here’s the real cherry on top: Financial automation goes beyond boosting efficiency. It leverages AI to spot potential issues within your workflow before they become total tangles. For example, intuitive AI can flag duplicate invoices, learn preferences, and apply them to future workflows, such as populating previously used GL codes when categorizing expenses.

It can also help combat fraud, whether internally or externally. Your team can—and should—enable separate financial duties within an AP team so that two employees have to sign off on each payment.

3. Simplification: Financial automation streamlines the audit process.

Two words that’ll give any biz owner a headache? “Audit time.” From getting your financial records in order to ensuring all your paperwork is in top-notch, audit-ready condition, it’s a huge resource and time drain. The trick to hurdling audit obstacles? Streamlined systems that accurately track and collect financial information, helping you maintain tidy books all year.

Financial automation tools help you better track accounts payable and accounts receivable records so you can actually understand where your money is going. BILL’s Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable use automation to create a permanent record of bills, approvals, and payments with a time-stamped audit trail. That’s right: Every step of the bookkeeping process is tracked, time-stamped, and preserved for years.

4. Talent: Financial automation helps achieve better AP talent retention.

Here’s a tough stat to swallow: One in five AP employees will approach retirement age in the next five years. That means attracting and retaining top-notch talent is more important than ever. The accounting industry is facing an overall labor shortage, and fewer graduates are entering the field, so finance managers are going to have their hands full when it comes to creating work environments that their employees 

Financial automation to the rescue! By automating tedious financial processes, you can eliminate manual tasks that frustrate employees in their day-to-day roles 

 reduce stressors. Say goodbye to audit headaches, bugging your colleagues for completed expense reports, and headache-inducing calculations that push employees away.

5. Flexibility: Automating your finances gives you more flexible payment options. 

It’s almost 2024. Payments come in all different shapes and sizes these days, so you’ll need to tailor your biz to this new dynamic landscape if you wanna scale and grow. By configuring your business to seamlessly accept various payment methods, you not only optimize cash flow but also cultivate professional relationships with your vendors, meet critical financial deadlines with ease, and sidestep potential payment hiccups with customers.

Financial automation can organize and streamline multiple payment options, from ACH and paper checks to international payments and even credit cards. By automating your payments, you can create an intricate web of transactions with unparalleled efficiency and clarity. Financial automations offer a gateway to the future of payments and tailor your business to the unique demands of our ever-evolving financial landscape.

The landscape of finance is rapidly evolving, so embracing the power of financial automation with partners like BILL is a strategic must. From enhanced cost control and cash-flow management to turbocharged productivity and streamlined audits, the benefits are substantial. The future demands speed and adaptability, and financial automation is your ticket to success. Ready to take your business to the next level? Let BILL help you reach the top.

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BILL

Bill.com CFO Brew Q4 2023 Article Native Ad

Everything you need to know about financial automation operations and your business

Steven I. Weiss

Do you remember how to calculate free cash flow? How about cost of carry? Well, if you don’t, there’s help out there. The latest trend on finance LinkedIn is for experts to produce  splashy “cheat sheets” that can keep that information and more, right where you need it.

While they can be useful, all of these cheat sheets should come with a “buyer beware” warning. You should probably always look for additional sources whenever you’re doing important work, recognizing that these cheat sheets could be wrong for your situation, for a variety of reasons: A mix of typos might have crept in at any point in creating these cheats sheets, and there are differing approaches to some of the calculations they discuss (such as how to compute customer lifetime value at a high-growth startup) that can’t be quickly summarized.

To help you sort through the avalanche of information out there, here are three that caught our eye, and what they have to share.

 One of the more comprehensive offerings out there, this offers the formulas for 90 different key performance indicators. It also devotes substantial real estate to describing the financial organization, from job titles and hierarchy to methods and skills required for different positions. One of the more surprising pieces is a section on “Financial terms explained to non-finance people”. Try them out on your friends and family, and let us know if they work.

: Shared with the comment, “Because Accounting is Not Finance,” this sheet sends both fields to their respective sides, and compares them. There are examples of different KPIs, required skills, career paths, and then certain information that’s more important for accounting or finance. It’s hard to choose just one cheat sheet from Labes to share, because 

 is full of infographics on everything from cash flow to profitability. She seems to be assembling almost a textbook full of information on her feed.

: Aharonoff also has plenty of broader finance material on his LinkedIn feed, but this industry-specific look digs into a few areas of concern for professionals in the software-as-a-service space. Those breakdowns seem like the kind of thing a SaaS specialist can use as a reminder of what differentiates the work they’re doing from others, when on a quick call with investors or other stakeholders.

What are you looking for as quick-reference material, and what resources have you found most helpful in your finance journey? Drop us a line and let us know.—

Cheat sheet roundup: tips to keep on top of finance terms and practice

Finance influencers are sharing their quick-reference guides for corporate finance.

, finance chiefs are spending more time than ever with their treasury function, experts tell CFO Brew.

Over the past few years, CFOs have worked hard to become 

. Moving past number-crunching, finance chiefs have developed analytical finance forecasting teams that can pair business decisions with swift data points and serve beyond quarterly reporting.

But for some CFOs, the recent upheaval in the banking sector has refocused their attention on the practical nuts and bolts of financial management.

Michael Bayer, CFO of storage-production company Wasabi Technologies, described companies’ reactions to recent events as, “Wait a second, I trusted my whole banking infrastructure and I can’t trust the banks anymore.”  He added, “I think all of us, as CFOs, got a wake-up call. We’ve got to go back to basics and make sure our banking infrastructure is sound and in place.”

For some CFOs, that means working closer than ever with their treasury function. Alison Staloch, CFO of real-estate investment platform Fundrise, said that she has been spending time shoring up their treasury processes, working closely with the treasurer to evaluate the moves available to the platform.

“That includes both knowing our counterparties [and] making sure we’ve appropriately diversified our counterparty risk,” Staloch told CFO Brew. The finance chief said that they are making sure their “operational agility is balanced,” so the company can pivot treasury operations seamlessly if necessary.

CFO and Treasurer: Sonalee Parekh, CFO of RingCentral, told CFO Brew that the treasurer and herself are in “lockstep at the moment,” spending more time together in the last two months than the past six.

“Access to and cost of capital are very key considerations for all CFOs,” Parekh said. “And it’s something I talk about with my treasurer all the time in this rising rate environment: The cost of borrowing is increasing significantly.”

The need for an active treasurer has spilled into job searches, Jim Lawson, managing director at Russell Reynolds Associates and co-global leader of its financial officers practice, told CFO Brew, adding that he’s spent much of the past few months placing treasurers.

But while the finance chief may be looking closer to the treasurer function, it’s not unusual for corporate finance to need to quickly pivot, Bayer said.

“The [CFO is] ultimately the one who’s got the broad span and visibility across all the resources that the company has at its disposal—capital, people, customers, vendors, investors…and so that role is constantly shifting around based on what’s the current need,” he said.

Office workers examine papers with charts and graphs.

Finance

How today’s trends can help CFOs make strategic decisions.

Household debt growth is slowing, but there are some red flags

Foreign exchange (FX) for business, explained

Step into the future of finance

Step into the future of finance

Cheat sheet roundup: tips to keep on top of finance terms and practice

Finance chiefs in close lockstep with treasury function

News built for finance pros