About Centage

Centage CFO Discusses the Evolution of the FP&A Professional and Owning Your Own Career on CFO Thought Leader Podcast

October 17, 2019 By Centage

Centage’s CFO Jason Lin, who joined our executive team earlier this year, participated in a lively discussion with Jack Sweeney for his recent podcast episode of CFO Thought Leader. Jason and Jack talk about the new role of the FP&A Professional, the difference between a manager and a leader, how Jason’s path has evolved through ups and downs and what he sees as the most important challenges and lessons learned from both ends of this spectrum. As Jason says, “you have to own your own career, no one else is responsible for it,” and explains how his focus on team and relationship building and his habit of keeping a career journal has guided his success into a fast-growing fintech organization, where he serves as a strategic advisor and corporate leader.

Listen to the full podcast here or download wherever you get your podcasts!

Meet the Maestros – Adam Rice, Vice President of Product Development

August 27, 2019 By Centage

With an extensive background in technical leadership, Adam Rice drives the development of Centage’s suite of planning and budgeting products. In this continuing series, we bring you our interview with Adam so that you can Meet the Maestro.

Q: How is developing the Centage suite different from other product development that you’ve overseen?

“One thing that I continue to be impressed with is the willingness of each and every individual on the Product Development team to embrace continuous improvement,” Adam told us, pointing out that those improvements come from a number of angles, including tweaks and changes to the software development process to the ways in which the team communicates together and with the rest of the organization. The improvements also reflect on the development team’s approach to the product. “We’ve continued a mindset shift to a customer-centric approach,” Adam explains, “balancing our work in support of both existing and prospective customers alike.”

Q: What are the advantages of developing Centage’s products as cloud-native?

“There are a number of clear competitive advantages of cloud-native applications over more traditional enterprise applications,” Adam points out. Some of those are advantageous for Centage, but more importantly, it offers significant advantages for the customer. “The advantages include automatic scalability of system components so that platforms inherently adjust to our customers’ workload demands over time.” Offering cloud-based applications increase availability for clients. “Cloud-native applications are inherently resilient to failures, automatically handling any potential outages by instantly moving traffic from one application slice or data center to another without interrupting the service.”

Q: What future features do you see Centage customers asking for that would be new and different from other budgeting applications?

Adam sees advanced reporting as a key differentiator for Centage. “Static reports are just the beginning, and something that many of our competitors offer as table stakes,” Adam explains. “Layer in visually appealing dashboards along with a suite of data analysis and real-time reporting alerts to notify users when, for example, specific thresholds are exceeded – that can quickly become the sizzle on the steak that is Planning Maestro.”

Q: How does Centage approach innovation?

Adam describes Centage’s approach as incremental and “bottom-up”. “We provide opportunities for our team members to explore innovative techniques for solving problems by presenting business problems and seeking the best ideas from the team,” Adam tells us. Experience level doesn’t matter – only the best idea does. “Our goal is to leverage available technologies to solve business problems in the most efficient manner, relying on the individuals that are as close to the information as possible.” Adam prefers this to the more traditional “top-down” approach to innovation, where companies artificially drive innovation with challenges and other, similar events and initiatives.

Q: What is the most important thing your team does when rolling out new features in the Centage suite of products?

Adam doesn’t mince words on this answer. “Two words – automated testing.” He acknowledges that it’s a developing process within the organization, but one that they are dedicated to building on because of its importance. “Automated testing is critical to our success, as it allows us to confidently and more quickly build and release new product features.” And there is good reason for Adam’s belief in this method of testing. “A solid suite of automated tests provides a safety net for the engineering teams, ensuring that the new changes they’ve made both work as intended, and of equal importance, don’t adversely impact existing functionality.”

Announcing the New Centage Partner Program

July 23, 2019 By Centage

Centage has always been committed to the success of organizations. That’s why we’re pleased to introduce the Maestro Partner Program – our new partner program designed to help partners design, develop and deliver Planning Maestro to their customers.

The new Maestro Partner Program has one important goal – to help our partners differentiate their businesses by offering sophisticated planning and analytic solutions to finance teams and business leaders.

Standing out from the throng of market competitors is a tremendous task, especially in the business to business space. One way to ensure you are adding real value for your customers is to offer the best possible solutions that uniquely suit their needs. For small-to-medium sized businesses to grow, they need access to sophisticated analytics, planning, and budgeting tools that help them get from today’s needs to tomorrow’s big idea.

Centage makes it easy for organizations to better serve their customers with modern, best-in-class solutions. We’ve built our reputation on developing and delivering exceptional software for finance teams from a foundation of years spent helping SMBs better understand their business and plan for the future. With the Maestro Partner Program, we’ve put that same level of commitment into developing a program entirely focused on customer success.

How the Program Helps Partners

To ensure the program that would be of the highest benefit to our partners, Centage built the new program around the following principles:

- Committed to Customer Success: We understand that the most important decisions we make will add value for our mutual customers.
- Focused on Partner Growth: We are committed to delivering innovative solutions and resources you need so your business can thrive.
- Encourages Strong Connections: We promise to collaborate and seek input, and evolve to better meet your challenges and your customers’ needs.

Simply put, we’ll continue to make high-value, industry-leading products that you’ll be proud to offer to your customers and work with you to continually improve the program.

Interested in finding out more about how you can join the MaestroPartner Program? Learn more at https://www.centage.com/become-a-centage-partner/ and get started today.

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.

Meet the Maestros: Jason Lin, Centage CFO

May 28, 2019 By 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.

The Forecasting Revolution

March 12, 2019 By Centage

Traditional methods of financial forecasting are failing mid-market companies. Modern businesses are too complex to be fully represented in a single spreadsheet, resulting in the creation of multiple, interconnected sheets with brittle macros and formulas tying them together.

That’s where intelligent forecasting comes in. Intelligent forecasts answer the challenges that traditional forecasting creates while providing both a broader and deeper understanding of the business and its operations. Check out our infographic on The Forecasting Revolution to learn the benefits of modernizing the Office of Finance.

Why intelligent planning?

About Centage

How the Program Helps Partners

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