In Their Own Words: Data Cleanup Handcuffs

Which is the bigger contributor to that “two weeks cleaning up” handcuff? The state of the underlying data, or the automation? Honest answer, we don’t fully know.

But based on the discovery conversation we did have with this CFO, and on what we see more often than not… we’d guess option A. The state of the underlying data.

Maybe there’s a self-selection bias given the nature of our work. Though we talk with a lot of CFO’s, including plenty who don’t enter our funnel.

And more often than not, particularly with businesses that have some “multi” in their mix (multi-channel, multi-revenue stream, multi-product), messiness in the data is the bigger drag on finance teams really being able to put their data to work.

Even when they’ve automated some of the data collection and integration, the clean up requirement remains high and trust in the output remains low-medium.

Or as another CFO put it, “If I could solve anything now that I think about it, it’d be to be able to serve up the information that people feel is credible and believe in, in a timely manner.”

We see it more as an order of operations question than an either-or. But our POV is that handcuff removal starts most effectively with systematic cleaning, then on to automation. You?

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