Rapid monetary tightening, persistent inflationary pressures, liquidity swings, uneven fundraising conditions, and renewed regulatory scrutiny over the last two years have reshaped risk appetites and operating models across asset management, insurance, lending, fintech and specialty finance.
Today, this means financial services leaders are operating under various pressures in a market that rewards discipline, penalizes indecision and exposes any gap in operational control. Stakeholders want precision and speed, and boards, investors, rating agencies, and regulators expect real-time transparency, a defensible plan and reliable execution.
However, while the role of finance leaders has shifted from financial steward to strategic leader, results from Cherry Bekaert’s inaugural 2025 CFO Survey indicate that nearly two-thirds of finance leaders are operating with suboptimal systems, creating gaps in the finance function’s ability to deliver timely insights, support strategic decisions and respond to change.
The Finance Function Faces a Gauntlet of Pressures
Across financial services, the finance function faces a consistent set of pressures, including:
- Regulatory Complexity and Frequency: More intense examinations, compressed reporting timelines, and an expectation of granular, entity-level transparency.
- Multi-entity Consolidation Challenges: Growth through acquisition, fund launches, and special purpose vehicles (SPVs) creates reporting complexity and manual reconciliations that slow the close.
- Persistent Cost Pressure: Margin vigilance and return on investment (ROI) scrutiny make capital allocation and technology selection more consequential.
- Talent Capacity and Retention: Teams are stretched by manual work, version control issues and rework; high performers want to do more analysis and less data wrangling.
- Stakeholder Expectations: Boards and investors want real-time dashboards, reliable forecasts and scenario analyses that withstand scrutiny.
- ESG and Nonfinancial Metrics: The expectation to track and report environmental, social and governance (ESG) indicators keeps rising, even as frameworks evolve.
When spreadsheets and entry-level tools anchor your finance stack, these pressures compound, silos widen, manual effort expands, and the organization’s line of sight narrows exactly when it needs to broaden. Conversely, when leaders standardize on a cloud platform designed for complex, multi-entity environments, they regain control. The finance function becomes the stabilizing system of record and the engine of decision velocity.
Three Core Moves for Finance Leaders
The solution? Success in this market hinges on a pragmatic, finance-led roadmap that restores control, creates clarity and builds a durable advantage in uncertain times. With that, are three core non-negotiables, each enabled by a modern, cloud-native financial system like Sage Intacct.
These core moves for finance leaders include:
- Commanding real-time visibility and agility across entities and lines of business by using a robust enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, so leaders can act with confidence and speed.
- Institutionalizing risk, compliance and controls to protect the enterprise and strengthen stakeholder trust.
- Elevating planning and decision velocity with rolling forecasts, scenario modeling and AI-assisted insights.
Core Move 1: Command Real-time Visibility and Agility
To stay ahead in a fast-changing market, finance leaders need the power to command real-time visibility and agility.
Why It Matters Now
In volatile markets, waiting for month-end to understand performance is a risk. Leaders need to see profitability by segment, cash positions by entity, and trend lines by key performance indicator (KPI), all without manual consolidation. When you cannot see clearly, you hesitate. When you can see clearly, you move first.
How Sage Intacct Helps
Sage Intacct provides a single source of financial truth with dimensional analysis across entities, products, funds, and regions that is available in real time to the right leaders so you can pivot quickly and allocate capital with precision. Key features include:
- Multi-entity Management and Global Consolidations: Automate eliminations, currency conversions and intercompany entries; close faster with fewer manual touchpoints.
- Dimensional General Ledger: Tag transactions with meaningful business drivers (fund, portfolio, product, channel, region, legal entity and more) for instant slice-and-dice reporting.
- Real-time Dashboards and KPIs: Role-based views for CFOs, controllers, business unit leaders and Board-facing summaries; no spreadsheet stitching required.
- Cash Management and Visibility: Monitor cash by entity and currency; improve forecasting and liquidity planning.
- Open API for Integrations: Connect core systems (portfolio and policy administration, loan origination, CRM, expense, payroll, data warehouses) to reduce duplicate entry and reconcile once.
Critical Results
- Close cycle time reduced substantially; consolidations run automatically.
- Daily, not monthly, visibility into revenue, expenses, cash and key risk indicators.
- Leaders agree on one set of numbers; meetings shift from “what happened?” to “what should we do next?”
- Finance teams reallocate hours from manual reconciliations to analysis and scenario work.
Core Move 2: Institutionalize Risk, Compliance and Controls Enabled by Sage Intacct
In an era of heightened regulatory demands and financial complexity, finance leaders must institutionalize risk, compliance and controls.
Why It Matters Now
Regulatory scrutiny has intensified. Firms that rely on manual approvals, email trails or informal workarounds face unnecessary exposure. Stakeholders reward organizations that can consistently demonstrate control strength and data integrity, not just at year-end.
How Sage Intacct Helps
Sage Intacct provides embedded, audit-ready controls aligned to regulatory expectations and internal policies, with end-to-end traceability that reduces risk, accelerates audits and protects the brand. These functions include:
- Audit Trail and Segregation of Duties: Complete traceability of changes and approvals; configurable roles and workflows reduce the risk of error or fraud.
- Policy-driven Approvals: Standardize purchasing, vendor onboarding, and payments through multi-level approvals and thresholds aligned to governance requirements.
- GAAP/IFRS Reporting Support: Prebuilt financial statements and disclosures streamline external reporting; statistical accounts enable nonfinancial KPI tracking.
- Continuous Monitoring With AI: Outlier detection in the general ledger surfaces anomalies for review before close, improving data quality and reducing rework.
- Compliance-ready Documentation: Centralize artifacts and evidence to ease regulator and auditor requests.
Critical Results
- Documented, enforced workflows that match your risk appetite and regulatory obligations.
- Exceptions identified early, fewer surprises late in the cycle.
- Reduced audit PBC lists and faster responses to regulator or investor requests.
- A clear, repeatable path from transaction to reported number.
Core Move 3: Elevate Planning, Forecasting and Decision Velocity
To thrive in today’s dynamic business environment, finance leaders must elevate planning, accelerate forecasting and boost decision velocity.
Why It Matters Now
Planning once a year is misaligned with today’s pace of change. Finance teams need the capacity to model rate scenarios, credit loss sensitivities, fundraising trajectories and expense containment options — and to communicate those implications clearly to the C-suite and board. The CFO survey called for moving from reactive to proactive; the mechanism is a planning process anchored in real-time data.
How Sage Intacct Helps
Sage Intacct provides rolling forecasts and scenario plans that are connected to actuals, refreshed continuously and easily stress-tested — so leadership can make decisions quickly and confidently. To enable this core move, Sage offers:
- Budgeting and Planning: Driver-based models, automated workflows and collaboration features accelerate cycles and improve transparency.
- Actuals-to-Plan Linkage: Variances are visible in real time; assumptions can be adjusted and outputs reconciled quickly.
- Scenario Modeling: Compare base, downside and upside cases; quantify impacts on cash, profitability and capital allocation.
- Operational and ESG Metrics: Use statistical accounts to include nonfinancial drivers and ESG indicators within forecast models.
- AI-enabled Insights: Surface trends and anomalies; pre-empt surprises and course-correct sooner.
Critical Results
- A 12 – 18 month rolling forecast updated monthly or quarterly, tied to strategic initiatives and capital plans.
- Decision packages that articulate trade-offs, timing and financial impact — grounded in data, not instinct alone.
- Greater alignment across the C-suite; finance leads the conversation with clarity and confidence.
Putting the Moves Together: A Practical Operating Blueprint
Establishing order in a volatile market requires both system capability and operating discipline. Use this blueprint to build momentum in 90 – 180 days.
1) Assess and Align
- Identify critical reporting, compliance and planning gaps.
- Prioritize high-impact KPIs (e.g., time to close, consolidation cycle, forecast accuracy, cash visibility, cost-to-serve, AUM/portfolio unit economics, loss ratios, delinquency trends).
- Align stakeholders on success criteria and governance (close calendar, approvals, accountability).
2) Architect the System for Scale
- Define your entity structure and dimension strategy to reflect funds, products, channels and regions.
- Configure role-based dashboards for CFO, controller, FP&A, business unit leaders and audit committee.
- Map controls to workflows; automate approvals consistent with policy and risk appetite.
3) Implement With Discipline
- Migrate and cleanse core data; establish a standard chart of accounts and master data governance.
- Integrate key systems (CRM, portfolio admin, loan origination, expense management, payroll).
- Pilot dashboards and reports with a representative business unit; iterate quickly and document standards.
4) Operate and Improve
- Lock in the operating cadence; close schedule, forecast refresh cycle, KPI reviews and variance escalation paths.
- Use AI insights to monitor anomalies and reduce rework proactively.
- Expand to advanced planning scenarios as data maturity improves.
From Resilience to Advantage: Turning Volatility Into Momentum
As reflected in our survey, financial services CFOs are no longer judged on the close process alone; they are expected to shape strategy, anticipate risk and reveal opportunities.
The key takeaway: The firms that win in this environment are decisive, data-driven and operationally consistent. They do not wait for certainty; they create it.
Making a Difference With Cherry Bekaert
Cherry Bekaert’s purpose is to help clients achieve their goals. We bring a client-first mindset, integrity, and accountability to every engagement, and we pair finance discipline with digital rigor. Our teams combine deep financial services experience with implementation, data and change management. We know that technology only delivers value when it is configured to your operating model, integrated with your data and adopted by your people.
We help you create order and stability through:
- Governance and Policy Alignment: From approval thresholds to role design, we help ensure the system enforces the way you want to run.
- Process Redesign: We simplify and standardize close, consolidation, and reporting processes for repeatability and transparency.
- Data Architecture and Quality: We establish master data standards and validation rules so leaders can trust the numbers.
- Enablement and Adoption: We train teams, document playbooks and stand-up performance dashboards aligned to responsibilities.
- Ongoing Advisory: We help refine KPIs, tune forecasts, and integrate new entities or products as your organization evolves.
Cherry Bekaert Is Your Sage Guide Forward
As a top five national Sage Partner and a top 10 value-added reseller of Sage Intacct, Cherry Bekaert helps organizations thrive by delivering powerful ERP solutions through a comprehensive Sage product suite. Our team brings deep insight and hands-on experience to every engagement — guiding you through implementation and beyond with strategic support that enables you to get the most from your Sage investment.
We are also proud to be a Sage Platinum Club winner for 2024, an honor we’ve earned for three consecutive years. This prestigious recognition highlights our leadership in sales, innovation in service delivery and strong collaboration with Sage. Contact us today to get started on your journey to enhancing your financial management process using the power of Sage Intacct.
