Chief Financial Officers and Strategic Planning

1997 Words4 Pages

Every major company with an executive committee has a CFO. The CFO plays a big part in the organisation as he is the one that handles the financial aspect of the company. He should have the knowledge about the company’s cash flow, its assets and liabilities, financial records, budgetary control, investments and shares among other things. It may sound simple but before the CFO can report back to the executive committee if the company is making money or losing it, he has to go through the different departments of the company that deal with the finances such as the sales, finance and accounting departments. Depending on the size of the company, the CFO will have varied scope of responsibilities and range of departments which he supervises to make sure that he will be able to give a transparent, precise and truthful report of the company’s financial status.

Strategic planning is a process wherein the company will allocate its resources and focus its priority in creating a strategy that will meet the company’s set goals according to its mission and vision or its future plans of evolving or expanding. This might involve change in processes or plans to make the operations of the company more efficient or improve the overall status of the company. The main focus is to make sure that everyone in the company and its stakeholders are focused towards common goals and there are a set of realistic and feasible results or expectations that could lead the company to being a better one. That way, once the strategic plan has been set and implemented, the success of it can be easily evaluated.

In this process, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of a company plays a big role. As such, the CFO has a big part in the strategic planning of the c...

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...net profit of the company. Since Nestlé operates in different parts of the world, I should be aware of the legalities or be able to delegate people who will carefully deal with such things that the company will not be submitted to any discrepancies or legal disputes. This means not only including the taxes and other liabilities in considering the net profit of the company but also being prepared in providing budgets for the employment of legal and financial experts for each region needed.

Forecasting is also a vital role of the CFO. If there is an effective way of forecasting over a period of time, it would give better data analysis and comparisons between the annual reports and minimise the differences in the projections for each time period. Budgeting is subjected on in-country products that will reduce too much detailed data and repetitive budget revisions.

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