About Centage

As the newest member of our Maestro team, Jason Lin brings with him extensive experience to help continue Centage’s evolution. In this post in our continuing series, we interviewed Jason so you could Meet the Maestro.

Q: Do you think finance leaders should be responsible for operational strategies?

“Finance leaders should absolutely be at the table for the discussion and development of operational strategies,” Jason says.   For finance leaders, though, it goes beyond simply being involved in the process. “They should also be stakeholders.”   This is because of the unique nature of finance within the organization.  As Jason explains, “Finance partners with every single department across the organization.  The finance team should be driving everyone toward their departmental goals.  These goals will roll up to corporate goals, and finance should be measured against achievement of these corporate goals.”

Q: What is the biggest challenge facing SMB finance teams today?

There are two big, related challenges Jason feels need to be managed by modern finance teams. “These teams need to be able to keep up with the business while maintaining accuracy – that’s key to establishing internal credibility,” he explains.  That means addressing things like the speed and pace of the market, competitors, and even the rate that internal business partners are moving at.  This has pushed teams to increase their response speed, too.  “Expectations for deliverables and deadline are also impacted. ‘Let me take this offline and get back to you next week’ is no longer an acceptable answer,” he states.  Small and medium businesses can also have additional challenges in keeping up with these expectations.  “SMB finance teams often operate extremely lean and have limited resources,” Jason says.

Q: What advantages do companies gain when they include the office of finance as a strategic partner?

Aligning operational goals and actions with the financial picture increases credibility and confidence in the organization. “Whether you’re talking to customers, investors, your Board of Directors, bank officers, auditors – whomever you’re talking to – the story is much more fluid and believable when the financial picture aligns with the operational narrative,” Jason explains. “If finance is truly a key business partner, alignment in these two stories is important so that the operational highlights are not disconnected from the financial statements.”

Q: How are modern finance teams different than teams from 10 or 15 years ago?

“Speed and pace, as I’ve already mentioned, is a huge change,” Jason says. “That speed extends to things like financial analytics and analysis.” It isn’t just the expectation around the speed of analytics that’s changed, though. “There’s an expectation to see, on the fly, the financial impact when business drivers and levers change.” Finally, Jason explains that finance teams must be much more business facing than ever before. “The ‘Ivory Tower’ of the Office of Finance does not exist anymore, especially in technology. Finance professionals are no longer back office employees that crank out reports and hand out budgets,” Jason says. These teams must now work shoulder to shoulder with their partners inside the business to drive the organization forward.

Centage Corporation’s Planning Maestro is a cloud-native planning & analytics platform that delivers year-round financial intelligence. With Planning Maestro, Centage offers the sophisticated features needed by small and mid-market organizations to integrate budgeting, forecasting, and deep data analysis within one easy-to-use, scalable SaaS solution. For more information on how to modernize your office of finance with intelligent planning, view our product demonstration video, or call 800-366-5111.

Dresner Advisory Services released their 2018 Small and Mid-Sized Enterprise (SME) Planning Market Study last week, examining the enterprise planning processes and needs of these organizations, and how they differ from larger enterprises. The study also evaluates planning software used by SMEs, with the report recognizing Centage’s Maestro Suite as a leader in the Experience and Credibility categories.

The study reports a significant increase in adoption of planning software in the SME space. In 2017, Dresner found that only 24 percent of small and mid-sized enterprises were leveraging planning software. The 2018 survey, on the other hand, found that number had jumped to 60 percent, with 68 percent of mid-sized organizations already having adopted the technology.

But adoption has far outpaced the projections from Dresner’s 2017 survey. This means that SMEs are choosing and implementing planning software outside of their normal planning cadence. Compelling offers and value propositions from vendors in the space, like Centage, combined with short-term needs, seem to be swaying enterprises to move beyond spreadsheets.

Understanding the position and adoption of planning software for SMEs is important, as the needs of these organizations can differ from larger enterprises. The report identifies certain areas, like strategic planning and rolling forecasts to be of similar importance between small, medium and large organizations.

Other areas, like cash-flow forecasting, proved more important to smaller enterprises. SMEs should evaluate planning software to ensure it is fully featured as well as easy to manage and deploy, while small organizations should take additional care to find solutions that are well suited to their needs, involving key business leaders as appropriate.

Deployment options differed between organization size, as well. In particular, small organizations rate cloud hosted solutions over other solutions, while larger organizations lean toward fully featured solutions that are part of a complete suite of software. The difference in preference was notable even between small and mid-sized companies – 24 percent of small organizations view SaaS applications as critical, with only 12 percent of mid-sized and large organizations considering cloud-based delivery as important. When evaluating planning software, enterprises of all sizes should define their optimal delivery model prior to evaluating vendors.

The report also provides vendor rankings based on real-world usage by customers. Vendors were divided into quadrants in the areas of both customer experience and credibility. Those located in the upper-right quadrant of the results were deemed industry leaders.

Centage ranked in the leader’s quadrant for both criteria. With features identified as important to both mid-sized organizations and small enterprises, Centage outranked heavy hitters like SAP and Microsoft in both categories. Centage’s commitment to customer service was reflected in the ratings, putting them ahead of all other solutions. In credibility, Centage and the Maestro Suite scored the highest in combined value and customer confidence.

Planning and forecasting are as important to smaller and mid-sized organizations as they are to large enterprises. It’s clear, however, that the needs of these companies differ from their larger counterparts, making a one-size-fits-all solution difficult to find. There are clear winners in the space, though, for those SMEs looking for the right tool that provides excellent value and service.

Click here to view the full report.

Small to mid-market organizations rely on Centage Corporation’s Maestro Suite, which includes Budget Maestro™ to help them keep track of and manage their cash flow. Budget Maestro improves the efficiency and effectiveness of business budgeting and planning, financial forecasting, financial consolidation, and reporting processes. For more information, take a tour of Budget Maestro, contact Centage, or call 800-366-5111 now.