Accountants Hold Vital Role in Driving Financial Transformation

A new survey underscores the role that accountants play in motivating, determining, and implementing new solutions that modernize their work. This also helps ensure their organizations are competitive and compliant in a complex and dynamic environment, and aid the CFO and others in understanding the transformation imperative.

These are part of the results from FloQast’s survey, Embracing Financial Transformation: What It Is, Why Organizations Should Want It, and How to Achieve It. FloQast is a finance and accounting operations platform provider.

The survey explores factors of both awareness and understanding around the concept of financial transformation among accounting and finance teams, as well as the steps teams may take to achieve it. Additionally, for the first time ever, FloQast has adapted academic frameworks for the accounting industry to further evaluate financial transformation, resulting in two new models that may be adopted by teams everywhere:

The Financial Transformation Framework: Four essential components for effective transformation
The Financial Transformation Belief Model: A process for giving time and attention to true transformation

Conducted in partnership with the University of Georgia Consumer Analytics Program, the survey includes the perspectives of 385 accounting and finance professionals, including CFOs, controllers, and their teams. FloQast looked for individuals and organizations that varied in tenure, company size, certification status, and IPO status.

“CFOs and their teams are under immense pressure to transform financially, but we’ve found there’s often a lack of understanding about what exactly transformation means and how to achieve it,” said Mike Whitmire, CEO and co-founder of FloQast, CPA. “It’s a team effort that requires collaboration, awareness, and cohesiveness from all members of the team. But perhaps the biggest catalyst to this transformation comes from accountants themselves, who have the most intimate understanding of the record-to-report landscape and stand to be immensely valuable to CFO-driven transformation initiatives with the right resources.”

FloQast found that there’s still a significant gap for many teams when it comes to becoming this catalyst. Data demonstrated that accountants overwhelmingly need to gain a greater understanding of what financial transformation means for their organizations and revealed that few organizations have a cohesive financial transformation vision in place. Key insights include:

Accountant familiarity with the idea of financial transformation lags behind the CFO’s familiarity:

96% of CFOs have heard of financial transformation, and 61% are very familiar with it, showcasing the pressure on CFOs to guide their organizations through organizational change.
In fact, CFOs are 2.2 times more likely to be aware of financial transformation than accountants.

CFOs and accountants are feeling the pressure to incorporate financial transformation initiatives into their future company plans:

Both CFOs and accountants recognize the importance of financial transformation, with 39% and 42%, respectively, seeing it as a top priority for their organization.
For both groups, just over two-thirds indicated that such an initiative for financial transformation exists for their organizations.

Both accountants and CFOs are optimistic about the role of AI in accounting and its potential to benefit the workplace:

Both groups believe in AI’s potential: Both believe AI will increase productivity — 37% and 30%, respectively — and is a critical component of financial transformation for both groups (32% and 28%, respectively).
Financial transformation initiatives primarily focus on automated processes for both accountants (54%) and CFOs (63%).

“Disparate workflows that address narrowly defined needs won’t deliver transformation,” said Razzak Jallow, CFO of FloQast. “The CFO’s role in this process is to collaborate with accounting teams to facilitate and add structure to all transformative efforts across the department. Transformation truly happens when the CFO empowers accountants to optimize cohesive financial transformation – not singular efforts they think will drive change.”

FloQast is committed to publishing industry research on today’s most pressing topics in the accounting and finance ecosystem. Last year, FloQast released the final installment in its Controller’s Guidebook survey series. It provided an overview of the pressures, challenges, and opportunities accountants were currently facing in the industry and focused on key themes such as burnout, technology, and ideal work environments.

Accounting