Finance: 4 tools that prove you are more than just invoices and spreadsheets

Within this post: Finance teams - Automation - Integration - CFO, COO, CEO

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Is it me or are finance teams often overlooked when it comes to the non-existing list of important areas of a business? Sales get the hero billing, they go out there and strive to hit targets, take stress onboard when not hitting a target, and are lauded when that lead comes to fruition. Not to take anything away from sales, they are super important. And what about Operations roles? They are like the gearbox in a car, they keep everything flowing and moving forward through day-to-day business activities.

Finance though, I feel, is given the rough end of the stick and kind of under-appreciated and taken for granted a little, let's be honest. “It’s just invoices and spreadsheets ‘n’ stuff.” (Despite the quotation marks, no one said this). Let’s go right to the top of the finance billing, the CFO. They have to be aware of so many aspects nowadays, not just there to solve a V-Look Up.

The CFO in the past could know the actual financial situation of a company and choose how to communicate this to anyone else, if at all. The less you know the better fellow workers. Now they have to turn figures into something tangible, something meaningful, so the rest of the business can use the information and act accordingly.

The Tech-Savvy CFO

Some may find it strange that an IT department in some companies actually report to the CFO. Why? The CEO is focused on the future, vision, and strategy. The COO is there ensuring the day-to-day Ops are slick and firing on all cylinders (sorry for another car reference). That means actually IT straddles many areas, but ultimately the CFO needs to be tech-minded in a tech industry, they manage the flow of finance, they need to know where the cash is landing, and they help to drive performance.

What about tech that is there to elevate the finance departments of the future? We have solutions such as us, Contractbook, whereby we can streamline contracts in all areas (as if you didn't know). But to add to this, CFOs and finance teams need tools that can complement their efforts and the tech they already have at their disposal. The more we put on the plate the more they need help in all areas and automation does not stop at the CFOs door.

Four Finance Tools You Should Know

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1. Airtable

Database or Spreadsheet? Airtable offers an alternative to spreadsheets. You can create a whole database of information ready to be utilized by your finance teams, mo more SQL in a database, no more forging manual relationships between cells (V Look Up). With a solution like Airtable, you can assign a relationship e.g if you were storing music you could assign a song to its genre, year, and artist. That way you would find it easy to locate and use in other areas. For finance, take calendar view, records, and kanban, you now have a calendar when a payment is scheduled, when the invoice is due, and you can shift along each stage.
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2. Chargebee

Collect payments with Chargebee. A Chargebee and Contractbook hook-up provide a robust & flexible system to enable your finance team to grab the baton from sales and run the right tools for your support team to ensure billing accuracy and a lightning-quick response for billing queries. When sales have secured deals, and there is a renewal in Contractbook, you can take recurring payments via a sync up with Chargebee, and no payments are ever missed, which ensures you have peace of mind
knowing that a 10% increase year on year is never forgotten.
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3. Google Sheets

Need we say more? Google Sheets is an alternate to Microsoft Excel and both are by now a staple finance tool. If you are going to use a spreadsheet focused integration, do so with the G Suite. You can integrate it seamlessly with Contractbook.
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4. Quickbooks

Quickbooks. We put together an article previously regarding Contractbook, CRM and integrations like Quickbooks. They seamlessly fit together by triggering reactions from each other, you can take data from your team’s CRM of choice, put it into a contract ensuring accuracy from the off, and trigger auto invoicing and collection of payments.

Take these recommendations and try them out for yourselves. Our friends at Zapier have a gazillion ‘Zaps’ that will help you get the most out of your tech stack led by Contractbook.