Helping the CFO Understand the Primary Disconnects That Impact the Financial Success of the Business

When a company is struggling financially, everyone knows it’s time to figure out why. Even a firm that is financially stable but not reaching its growth or profitability potential needs to do some serious investigation. This task typically falls to the CFO to scour through the financials looking for possible reasons. The problem might be an emerging or sustained lack of new customers, a gradual or precipitous drop in sales and revenue, a steady or sudden uptick in delinquent receivables, or any number of other reasons. But it’s also important to consider the potential root cause that may be driving any or all of these problems, one that tends to get overlooked in the C-Suite—organizational disconnects.

Revealing the Primary Disconnects

In today’s business environment, there are four primary disconnects that occur all too frequently. Once CFOs understand what they are, they can begin to reconnect the dots.

1. Digital Disconnect

By automating more business functions, companies are gaining incredible efficiencies compared to their costly manual processes of old. But just because you can automate something doesn’t necessarily mean you should, or that if you do, you should forget the human touch. There is a right way to automate that still allows for that influencing personal touch. Otherwise, you risk limiting the benefits gained by automation. Take AR automation that can handle many of the mundane tasks associated with invoicing and collections. If a long-time customer with an on-time payment history is suddenly late, which is more likely to induce them to pay: a personalized phone call or email versus an automated sequence of emails with blunt language? Without a doubt, a more nuanced and personalized message will help collect the invoice and maintain the customer relationship.

2. Organizational Disconnect

On the flip side are companies that haven’t automated many or any business functions and still rely on manual processes and paper-based or spreadsheet-driven documentation. The lack of automation creates several opportunity costs, including:

• Loss of experienced talent
• Difficulty appealing to new talent
• Loss of organizational memory about processes and relationships when staff leave
• Inefficient and discordant processes

According to Gartner research, 93% of senior finance leaders were aligned on their vision for the finance function in 2025; those leaders expect to see a function that is leaner, with fewer employees, and more data driven, however, only 39% of finance leaders said that their previous transformation efforts delivered the expected benefits to finance, and even fewer, 36%, reported tangible business benefits. Companies need to go from not just workflow automation but to outcome automation.

3. Cash Flow Disconnect

Too often as everyone in the company works to meet their individual goals, they don’t have insight into (or think about) how their actions might impact overall company cash flow. It’s likely that most don’t even understand why their impacts on cash flow matter. That lack of cash flow literacy can inadvertently hurt the bottom line. For example, a sales person might agree to relax payment terms or the customer’s billing schedule in order to sign a new deal, thinking only about the potential revenue and not the impact on cash flow.

4. Values Disconnect

And finally, do your company’s actions live up to its words, the ones written as your mission, vision, and values? For example, if you say you value customers but then refuse to work with them when they hit a rough patch, that disconnect can have a lasting negative effect on your reputation and relationships.

Solving the Primary Disconnects

Digital finance tools like Tesorio Cash Flow Direct increase enterprise-wide visibility, giving CFOs the power to break down these disconnects and create more fluid connectivity throughout the organization. See this visibility in action by asking for your Tesorio demo today. To learn more about organizational disconnects and the concept of Connected Finance, listen to Tesorio’s recent webinar, The Connected CFO: The Future of Finance.