For the Chief Financial Officer (CFO):

• Strategic Blind Spots: You need real-time, consolidated financial visibility to make agile decisions and allocate capital effectively. Without it, you’re flying in the dark, often contending with prolonged close timelines and delayed reporting.
  • For example, one CFO recently enlisted our team to advise on tech pain points, swiftly shifting focus to strategic ways to improve working capital utilization, optimize accounting and finance processes, and directly impact cash flow velocity. This order-to-cash transformation automated most order-to-invoice processes and reduced half of the manual invoice-to-cash efforts, accelerating cash realization and improving liquidity for strategic investments. The resulting  99% billing accuracy and greater than 90% overall master data and reporting accuracy provided reliable, real-time insights crucial for the CFO to confidently make key decisions and allocate capital. Similarly, we’ve served as a catalyst for several other CFOs, strategically improving the dynamic between Finance and Sales by elevating processes and markedly reducing the number of days sales outstanding (DSO).
• Unreliable Reporting: Accurately projecting future needs or demonstrating financial health to potential investors and lenders becomes a significant hurdle when data is inconsistent or unreliable, which makes it more difficult for CFOs to articulate an accurate financial picture.
  • In our recent work with a global network management services provider, the team’s manual, spreadsheet-based approach hindered the CFO’s ability to confidently project cash flow and present an accurate financial picture to key stakeholders and investors. By helping the company select and implement OneStream as its global Corporate Performance Management (CPM) system, we empowered the CFO with centralized, on-demand reporting , significantly reducing close times and forecasting cycles. The solution also streamlined data integration and workflow management from NetSuite. This elevated approach to reporting provided the CFO and leadership team with the strategic clarity and reliable data needed for confident decision-making and optimizing capital allocation.

For the Chief Accounting Officer (CAO) / Controller:

• Manual Overload: Burdensome, error-prone manual processes—think endless reconciliations, journal entries, and reporting—slow down your month-end close and create unnecessary stress. Savvy CAOs and controllers are seeking ways to reduce their teams’ over-reliance on manual processes and better manage large or aged unreconciled balances.
  • Recently, we partnered with a services company to transform their record-to-report process and optimize their close. Our efforts led to the automation of over 50 manual journal entries and a projected 30% reduction in monthly manual journal entries. Our targeted automation and process enhancement also significantly improved the adoption of BlackLine for account reconciliations and close management. These improvements ultimately achieved FTE savings equivalent to 10% of their accounting organization.
• Control Risks & Inaccuracies: Fragmented systems and weak controls significantly increase the risk of errors, non-compliance, and a need to deal with audit deficiencies. These issues can be especially prevalent when dealing with decentralized, disparate processes and teams or facing employee turnover and inadequate headcount.
  • A common scenario we’ve helped companies address is reflected in our work with a rapidly growing PE-backed distribution firm. They faced significant audit risk due to unreconciled accounts, a large unapplied cash balance, and improper project accounting. We dove deep, identified and corrected root-cause errors across cash application and project accounting—reconciling balances, restating project financials, and implementing stronger, scalable procedures and technology enhancements. The result was audit-ready financials and processes built to support ongoing growth.

For the Vice President of Financial Planning & Analysis (VP of FP&A):

• Forecasting Frustration: Producing timely, accurate, and granular forecasts is nearly impossible with poor data quality. In addition, the need for constant, manual aggregation is often exacerbated by inefficient or under-utilized technology.
  • Many of our clients are considering how their visualization capabilities can be elevated and how their related data warehouse needs can be solved. VUE by Riveron, an automated reporting solution, has enabled several organizations to implement dashboards in rapid timeframes and use their existing data in a centralized and easily maintained way. By having more real-time access to a single source of truth, activities like forecasting—which require a firm grounding in actuals, booked revenue, and historical trends—become far more efficient and effective.
• Limited Strategic Impact: You’re spending too much time collecting data and not enough analyzing it or providing proactive insights and robust scenario modeling.
  • In serving one of our private equity clients, a portfolio company was relying solely on spreadsheets for budgeting, limiting the ability to model scenarios quickly. We introduced a new FP&A tool that allowed them to run dynamic ‘what-if’ analyses in minutes, directly informing strategic growth initiatives.

Common symptoms across the board include heavy reliance on spreadsheets, disparate systems that don’t talk to each other, a lack of integrated data, and an inability to scale processes as the company grows.