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Perspectives
Finance and controllership in 2025
Revisiting the forecast for the future of finance and controllership
In 2018, as digital disruption was prompting its own new realities, we predicted eight finance trends for 2025. We are halfway there, and everything has changed, so we revisited those predictions to see where those trends stand today, how they may have evolved, and the implications for Controllership and the workforce of the future.
October 20, 2021
A blog post by David Cutbill, principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP
In 2018, as digital disruption prompted new realities in finance, Deloitte made eight predictions about finance trends with 2025 as the horizon. The pandemic accelerated those disruptions that informed our original implications about the near future. With the rapid transformation coupled with recent market conditions and unprecedented challenges that modified our initial assumptions, it looked like the right time to revisit those predictions to see where those trends stood today. Halfway to 2025, and everything has changed. We explore our updated predictions and how they evolved in Finance 2025 revisited and, in this article, the implications for Controllership and the workforce of the future.
The headwinds and tailwinds affecting our original assumptions for the future
Advancements in technology and digital disruption were a driving force behind the Finance 2025 predictions. A few years later, the pandemic has triggered extraordinary transformation across the finance function. The pandemic forced finance professionals to rethink longstanding views about the way Controllership and Finance operate. In 2019, closing the books in a fully remote environment was likely never considered a possibility. Now, it is the norm. In 2019, digital controllership at many organizations was just beginning to gain footing, with a lot of experimentation and mixed results. Now we see a series of technology solutions that can work together to drive desired business outcomes with the support of a strong data foundation. The pandemic prompted new ways of working that simplify processes and empower strategic thinking across finance. Now, with the insights gleaned from this time of rapid transformation and uncertainty, our updated predictions can serve to enlighten controllers and finance professionals with a clearer picture of the future and possibilities for controllership.
Looking at predictions through a controllership lens
Here we further look at the eight predictions in our Finance 2025 revisited report and extrapolate what each prediction may mean for Controllership and how those implications may direct transformation and inform strategy and operating models.
Finance will continue to automate, but the focus will shift from operational finance to financial insights. Automation will target end-to-end processes affecting multiple business areas rather than siloed activities, and the finance factory will concentrate on using big data, analytics, and predictive modeling to inform business strategy and decisions.
What this means for Controllership
Original predictions steered toward automation, but the lack of standardized processes and investment in data architecture slowed automation and shifted focus to the cloud. Automation has had mixed results in the past, with the automation of mostly task-based activities requiring scale to achieve return on investment. Instead, the growth of enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities highlights the more critical role cloud ERP has at the core foundation of controllership to drive automation across end-to-end processes.
Finance will, as predicted, focus more on service, analytics, and business insights, all of which mandate new capabilities. To bolster its capabilities, Finance will offload some responsibilities to captive locations, centers of excellence, and outsourcing vendors. Technology will also help Finance handle uncertainty and execute its value proposition as real-time information and auto-generated analysis move closer to reality.
What this means for Controllership
Controllership will standardize and move more processes to shared services and outsourcing centers. Additionally, as the end-to-end process moves toward automation and historical reporting shifts to complex real-time insights, the silos that have existed between Controllership and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) will dissolve, providing the opportunity for integration and collaboration that realizes tangible value and contributes to the larger business strategy.
Although real-time financial data will still be a ways off, quarterly reporting will gradually lose its relevance for investors and management, both of whom require more timely information to make decisions. Finance will be expected to remain agile, with the ability to post results between external reporting cycles while also meeting evolving internal management needs.
What this means for Controllership
With less value placed on historical reporting, Controllership will focus less on reducing close cycles and more on real-time information and continuous accounting. The challenge will be breaking the monthly reporting cycle and moving toward a more agile accounting model. However, real-time visibility into performance and projections remains aspirational. Since the platforms, data foundation, and finance routines aren't yet there to support it, the near-term focus will be less about immediate results and more about forecasts and analytics that inform commercial decisions.
Finance will remain uneasy about using self-service data, but it will embrace self-service to rationalize reporting requirements and special requests. Trigger-based alerts and natural language processing will become common in self-service applications. Finance will spend more time working with the business to harmonize discrepancies between self-service tools, language processing, and systems of record.
What this means for Controllership
Piggybacking on the growth of real-time data and ERP systems applications for data analysis, self-service data applications won’t perform solely as a utility for static reports; they will also provide more interactive tools and drill-down analysis of data. This can provide relevant and effective analytics at the businesses’ fingertips that may generate valuable data-driven insights, immediate answers, and more agile decision-making.
Cost reduction has historically been the driver of changes to finance operating models. But that focus will evolve as new models look to expand finance’s core capabilities and what it can deliver in partnership with other functions. Remote work, which has been a necessity throughout the pandemic, will likely remain to some degree, and many finance organizations will be set up to accommodate it.
What this means for Controllership
The early days of the pandemic underscored the benefits of having a distributed finance workforce equipped with collaboration tools around clearly defined work processes. It also highlighted the criticality of data security as people everywhere accessed corporate networks in remote environments. As we enter another phase, many companies are having staffing difficulties, as remote workforces offer access to larger talent pools, but facilitate greater competition for their existing talent. New service delivery models will also expand Controllership’s core capabilities and value delivered in partnership with other functions. As the overall business prizes new capabilities and coordination with partner networks expands, the traditional silos between functions will dissolve as they absorb responsibilities historically managed elsewhere.
Through acquisitions and functional enhancements, ERP vendors have primarily staved off competition from specialized applications and microservices. However, today’s big players will continue to swallow up cutting-edge capabilities and grow market share as one-stop providers. In addition, on-premises support will disappear as services increasingly move to the cloud.
What this means for Controllership
Cloud-based solutions offer continuous technological improvements that streamline processes and automate activities across all financial processes. As specialized apps and microservices have grown more sophisticated, ERP providers have also upped their game by adding new features and making acquisitions at a rapid pace. These specialized vendors and cloud-based ERPs will play a critical role in Finance and Controllership’s continued digital transformation from here on out, moving from back-office cost centers to the front-office drivers of business value.
Standardized, high-quality data will become even more essential, as data is the foundation for business insights, automation, and touchless operations. Finance will double down on massive data cleanup efforts, led by a finance data czar empowered to ensure data integrity and set the right governance strategy. In addition, many businesses will rely on their cloud-based ERP applications to underpin their core data architecture.
What this means for Controllership
Moving forward, data will provide the foundation for any successful finance organization. Controllership will rely heavily on data for strategic insights, enhanced analytics, and more driver-based reporting frameworks, making data quality crucial to the function’s performance. Many professionals face challenges compiling relevant, understandable, and effective data, and data’s ever-increasing volume and complexities only intensify these hurdles. Controllership will likely need to appoint a data czar: a data scientist with business acumen in a leadership role to oversee enterprise data strategy, systems frameworks, and processes to meet the challenge and critical need to generate impactful data and reporting frameworks.
Companies have, as we predicted, hired more data scientists, but not in Finance.1 Data scientists will, however, increasingly collaborate with Finance on data integration and analysis. To reduce its reliance on IT, Finance will hire more people who can configure and customize digital tools to generate insights while more of the workforce operates remotely as hybrid work models become common.
What this means for Controllership
Talent strategy has transformed faster than most anything, and the pandemic has been a driving force in many changes to the workforce and workplace. Remote work has been a necessity throughout the pandemic, and the remote model is here to stay. This model provides access to global talent pools, specialized resources, and alternative staffing models previously unavailable. The talent pool is no longer limited to location or timetables. In fact, the war for talent has reached a critical state that may finally trigger the adoption of distributed staffing models beyond the simple contract method. In addition to new talent models, the talent strategy will adapt to a remote or hybrid environment by tapping into the cost-efficiencies a dispersed workforce offers. While traditional finance skills remain central to the function, those with business acumen, a service mindset, and digital savvy will be in greatest demand.
To take a deep dive into our predictions for the future and the broader implications shaping transformation in Finance and Controllership, read our full report on Finance 2025 revisited.
Now, with a clearer picture of what the future of Controllership may look like, explore why it is the perfect time to refresh the function and give Controllership a reboot.
1Forbes, “The Data Analytics Profession And Employment Is Exploding—Three Trends That Matter,” June 11, 2021.
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