It’s time for a controllership reboot

At the outset of the pandemic, controllership had to evolve as it reprioritized resources and adjusted operations to maintain the function throughout a rapidly evolving environment with many unknown variables. While in the thick of daily execution, it was often difficult to see beyond the videoconferencing meeting window. More than a year on, we have some breathing room to ascertain potential lessons from the experience that may prove valuable for the controllership refresh.

Lockdowns, pausing in-person collaboration, and a shift to virtual work environments changed the way organizations work and conduct businesses. The sudden shift taught us more than how to use videoconferencing applications. We learned that innovation and new technology made collaboration possible and an effective remote close process a reality. Technology allowed us to work differently, but it also showed us that innovation makes it possible to get the job done in different environments. Taking it a step further, it was even possible to continue key transformation activities and broader strategic initiatives amid all the disruption. Perhaps the key lesson we can take from doing work differently is that we can still do the work in many environments with innovation, so we shouldn’t lose focus on the bigger picture.

Through this period of significant change and disruption, the business and how we work wasn’t the only thing that changed; the workforce also met a challenging transformation. Changes in the workforce highlight important lessons learned from this period. As teams adapted to remote work environments, we saw the lines between home and work blurring. Virtual team engagement effectively brought us into the homes of our team members. While the collision of the personal and impersonal may have been an adjustment, it highlighted the importance of the human side of work, including team members’ well-being, work-life balance, empathy, and diversity and inclusion. With physical proximity limited, team collaboration and communication became as important as ever for teams to remain resilient.

The pandemic brought with it an unpredictable global environment and uncertain future. This decreased the value of historical financial reporting while increasing the need for real-time reporting, including data analysis and predictive forecasting. Finding new ways to leverage real-time data and new forecast models, controllership could manage against multiple views and plausible scenarios to remain agile and resilient against an unpredictable future.

Improving data and the value of information to inform better decisions against multiple scenarios also meant moving beyond just ledger-based information into more meaningful insights, with curated data from additional sources.

Organizations can reprioritize activities by taking the many lessons learned throughout the pandemic—deciding what to eliminate, what to begin, what to automate, and what to amplify—to optimize the controllership function. For example, one organization decided to keep its adopted technology to manage a virtual close process, but moved toward fully automating its close process management and a modern risk and controls program. Another organization is developing ways to improve data and insights to create better information models that focus on scenario planning.

● Talent development of in-demand skills like data visualization and storytelling, data science and analytics, business partnering, and management of artificial intelligence (AI)

● New activities to meet changing needs, such as scenario planning, real-time cash flow, and working capital analytics and forecasting

● A more flexible organizational structure, removing silos across Finance

● Manual transactional processes using thoughtful automation

● Close process management

● A modern risk and controls program

● Collaboration and reporting tools adopted during the pandemic

● The focus on talent, engaging employees and fostering team-building

● Diversity and inclusion

● Some low-value, labor-intensive activities, replacing them with robotic solutions

● Activities based on materiality thresholds, rationalizing to a smaller set of key reports