For today’s CFOs to be able to act as effective strategic leaders, it’s crucial to be able to find and make use of key insights and data quickly and seamlessly — putting a critical spotlight on the technologies and tools currently at use within the business.

Many finance leaders are left trying to juggle an expanded list of responsibilities with outdated tech stacks. However, in a recent survey conducted by monetization platform Zuora, nearly three-quarters (68%) of such leaders said technology gaps were limiting their ability to make key enhancements, such as improving cash flow and forecasting or other parts of the order-to-cash process.

“It’s imperative in this environment, and especially as things are changing as quickly as they are, that CFOs…own the order-to-cash process,” Todd McElhatton, chief financial and operating officer for the billing and payments software company, told CFO Dive in an interview. “It impacts their ability to run the business, to report on the business, but more importantly, oftentimes, to allow the business the tools that they need to roll out the next level of products.”

Taking ownership  

The need to take ownership of the O2C process comes as the role of the finance chief has continued to evolve, with companies turning more and more often to their CFOs to help drive strategy as well as to manage traditional finance. For finance chiefs to be able to assume that ownership, however, they need to be able to shift their thinking on technology decisions.

For McElhatton, one of the takeaways from Zuora’s survey was that “CFOs aren't taking, in a lot of cases, the time to really understand the technology and owning those decisions,” he said. “Because, quite frankly, they have a huge impact on our ability to do our jobs, and, more importantly, to put the infrastructure in place that allows a company to grow and adapt to these changing markets.”

The company’s Modern Finance Leader report released Tuesday showed that most (89%) of finance leaders are increasingly expected to act as strategic advisors. However, 70% of respondents said their current tech stack is hampering their ability to do so.

Technology gaps or lags in the O2C process — as well as a lack of clarity over where, ultimately, ownership of that process lies — can hamper companies’ ability to make creative deals and can often lead to more manual work for already overworked teams, according to the survey of 900 finance leaders, including controllers, CFOs and chief accounting officers. Eighty-two percent of software-as-a-service leaders, for instance, said “fragmented O2C ownership causes operational challenges.”

Finance chiefs “don't want to be in a situation where, you don't have the technology that's allowing you to sell what your product teams have developed,” McElhatton said.

It's crucial for finance chiefs to play a starring role in SaaS and technology decisions to help prevent those sticking points, McElhatton said. When it comes to SaaS, it’s “an area that you’ve really got to look at [as], it's not a systems decision, it's a business decision,” he said.

“It's: how are we going to be able to operate? It has an impact on your ability not only to bill your customers, but to recognize revenue and to roll out products, and so for a CFO today not to be intimately engaged in those decisions, I think is going to be a real disadvantage to that company over the long term,” he said.

Opening the bottlenecks  

McElhatton himself is familiar with the expanding remit of the finance chief — a shift which, in many ways, feels like a natural evolution for the role, he said.  An alum of enterprise software firms including Oracle, VMware and SAP, McElhatton joined Zuora as its finance chief in 2020, when it was operating as a public company, he said.

The monetization software provider went private in February as part of a $1.7 billion deal with technology investment firm Silver Lake, according to company announcements. McElhatton assumed his combined role —which included taking on responsibilities for operations, IT, and legal, among other categories — in May, according to his LinkedIn profile.

CFOs already sit at a key nexus point inside of the business — the CFO and the CEO are “the only two people that see the entire company” at the end of the day, McElhatton said.

Having that perspective puts finance chiefs in an ideal place to take ownership of strategic decisions — not only does that viewpoint allow them to see all of the moving parts of the business and where resources can be best deployed, it also allows them to learn where critical bottlenecks are over time, he said. With his larger purview as COFO, “I can help unstick those things much quicker,” McElhatton said.

When it comes to technology decisions, CFOs should also apply that perspective to ensure they are making the choice that will set up the business for the long-term. While it’s impossible to have “perfect clarity” on how the next four or five years might impact one’s company, “you want to make sure you've got a set of operating systems and processes that give you the agility to manage through those different business models.”