“So, you are telling me I am going to run out of cash in eight weeks?”
Unfortunately, I get asked these types of questions frequently. More accurately, I tend to get this specific question shouted at me, as my career focuses on modernizing, automating, and cleaning up finance functions. While my forecasts and models give owners or managers fresh visibility into the future, many times at the outset, what they now see is not a great picture of the future. I consistently see companies burn through cash and just scratch their heads. “I just did not see that coming.”
Usually, these companies:
- Lack integrated or automated financial systems or processes through which they can access decision-making data
- Do not (or cannot) hold to a budget or maintain detailed profitability or cash forecasts.
Now, if they wanted to set themselves up for success, avoid some of these unfortunate surprises, or understand where they were making and losing money, they should have taken their financial automation and analytics a little more seriously. Automation could have provided quicker access to financial data. Analytics would have produced insights into that financial data that might have shined a light onto the waters ahead, giving the company time to correct course before a shipwreck occurred.
