Chief financial officers are the gatekeepers of your organization’s financial assets. Having access to these tools can help CFOs effectively collaborate with PMOs.
CFOs play a vital role in ensuring an organization’s financial assets are prudently spent and that there’s a solid return on investment. Exactly how does the role of a CFO impact projects? As part of project cost management, a CFOs role involves ensuring for every dollar invested in a project, the ROI is attractive and benefits need to be realized. To track budget and actuals, and forecast, and ensure there’s sufficient governance, CFOs can use tools like these to better understand projects and collaborate with project management offices on future projects.
By using tools like these, CFOs can play an important role in ensuring PMOs set realistic portfolio and project budgets and have a clear line of sight into spending.
Image: DataRails
DataRails is a financial planning and analysis solution that Excel users can leverage to easily collect, report and analyze data collected from each of your organizational systems such as general ledgers, customer relationship management, human resource management and other systems or spreadsheets. Having access to project information ensures CFOs can provide PMOs and executives with real-time financial insight and can make faster, more informed portfolio decisions. Sometimes project managers need to report financials to the C-suite, and CFOs are their gatekeepers. Many CFOs are still comfortable using Excel; DataRails makes it possible to use Excel as a front-end, yet it connects to any “single source of truth” you want, with built-in projection logic and visualizations. There’s no need for manual data migration, integrations with dynamic external data sources or version management.
Key features:
- Business and project insights help CFOs better collaborate with PMOs about potential projects using scenario analysis—”what if” modeling.
- Data consolidation and integrity provide confidence due to a complete, centralized database that safeguards data and ensures the validity of your numbers.
- Management and ad-hoc reporting for quickly extracting key information to answer PMO questions and data needed for fast, expert judgment.
- Process automation helps finance teams reduce Excel use by 75% in favor of real-time data to help companies streamline project strategy and analysis.
Contact DataRails for pricing.
Image: Unit4
Unit4 offers budget and financial forecasting tools that simplify complex tasks so teams can understand the numbers and share and act on insights for better results. The goal is to make it faster and easier for CFOs and their finance teams to understand the things that matter and use the knowledge to turn plans and ideas into action. Unit4 provides an integrated approach to your organization’s financial planning needs and includes planning cash flow, managing operational budgets or forecasting sales, costs and revenue. CFOs can work with PMOs to swiftly adapt to change and help optimize decision-making and governance with greater visibility and simplified compliance. This software-as-a-service platform has created intelligent enterprise applications on a foundation that assists with innovation to deliver great experiences.
Key features:
- Financial planning, budgeting and forecasting to help PMOs budget and stay within scope.
- Sales and operations planning to ensure PMOs define the necessary prerequisites, requirements and processes.
- Analytics and reporting for self-service business intelligence analytics.
- People planning and analytics to make better-informed decisions about people and how best to deploy them.
- Corporate performance management for a seamless, comprehensive performance management environment.
Contact Unit4 for pricing.
Image: FinancialForce
FinancialForce focuses on putting your customers at the center of everything. It’s a customer-centric, end-to-end enterprise resource planning solution. Built on a Salesforce platform, FinancialForce helps CFOs and PMOs work side-by-side to deliver maximum project and portfolio value and increase efficiencies. Its suite of tools spans accounting, financial management, enterprise resource planning and professional services automation. This is a comprehensive, unified cloud ERP option that can keep CFOs and their teams on the same page as project and portfolio managers to drive higher performance and success rates.
Key features:
- Accounting and financial management for real-time business intelligence, revenue recognition, forecasting and procurement.
- Dashboard metrics in real-time for increased visibility with customizable reporting across your entire organization.
- Professional services automation, including resource and project management, project financials, time and expenses billing and revenue recognition.
- Process automation to simplify digital adoption.
- Resource management to ensure CFOs and PMOs can align in managing all human resources. Includes workforce management, employee acquisition, engagement, management and workforce reporting and analytics.
Contact FinancialForce for pricing.
Image: Planguru
Planguru is an intelligent, dynamic financial forecasting tool that CFOs can use alongside PMOs to plan project expenditures. Focused on small- to mid-sized businesses, it’s available for businesses, non-profit organizations and advisors. Planguru provides flexible budgeting with high-level small business budgets or multi-department operating budgets with consolidations. There are also integrated financial statements that include income statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements, and forecasting methods for projecting up to 10 years out. With PlanGuru’s reporting tools, CFOs provide PMOs a view of specific aspects of projects and the impact on the business to help make the adjustments where needed to achieve higher levels of success.
Key features:
- Budgeting and financial analytics to help set financial goals and assign accountability for results.
- Rolling forecast to better understand the implications of decisions and help PMOs adapt quicker to a changing environment.
- Strategic planning to ensure everyone is working in the same direction.
- What-if scenarios to help PMOs evaluate risks and opportunities.
Planguru offers two pricing options. A monthly Planguru app at $39/usee/month or $899/user/annually. This option works best for single-entity SMBs or nonprofits. There’s also Planguru Desktop at $99/user/month or $899/user/annually. This option is for any entity that needs multi-department consolidations.
Image: Approve.com
Approve.com helps CFOs and finance teams collaborate better with procurement teams to gain visibility and control overspending. This real-time tool streamlines purchase requests, approvals, and vendors. It’s simple and flexible, providing increased visibility into your spending and allows you to identify bottlenecks. Approve.com supports complex workflows, all from a single team to thousands of users, to scale as your teams grow.
Key features:
- Purchase request forms can be set up quickly to capture user needs and initiate the right approval flow.
- Approval flows ensure approvers in finance can coordinate with procurement specialists who can approve, reject, return or consult, assuring the requisition is properly routed.
- Approved requests can automatically open to POs or trigger emails to specific stakeholders.
- The ability to browse and onboard vendors, automate tasks and approvals and stay on top of contract renewals.
- Reports and dashboards provide real-time visibility into spending.
Approve.com offers three pricing plans, Enhanced, Enterprise and Unlimited, along with a free demo. Contact Approve.com for details.
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