In today’s challenging environment, companies and their employees are facing unprecedented obstacles. Employees are working remotely while juggling childcare and online classes for their children. Companies are actively managing risk from all angles - risk related to employee health and safety, cybersecurity risk, and financial risk - all with tightened budgets.
How long will the pandemic last?
One thing is clear - companies (and employees) that embrace technology will weather through the storm more effectively and come out at the other end, perhaps leaner and more efficient. Why? Because we see evidence of companies that rely on technology as a core part of their business doing well during these times of remote-working, remote-learning, remote-exercising, and remote-happy hours. The stock prices of Amazon, Netflix, Zoom, and Peloton have soared since the beginning of the pandemic. All of these companies have anchored their core business on technology. In this virtual world we now live, technology helps us to execute daily activities from how we entertain ourselves, to how we socialize, meet with colleagues, exercise, and shop. As a society, we now rely on these must-haves to get us through the pandemic (for our sanity and that of our families).
The Changing Role of the CFO
Much has been discussed regarding the ever-changing role of the CFO. No longer are CFOs just custodians of the company’s budget and purse strings. We now expect the CFOs to play strategic roles within organizations, ranging from driving the technological transformation to driving revenue growth and identifying efficiencies and cost savings.
So, how can a CFO and his/her team do more with less?
By leveraging technology to complete the administrative and routine tasks, CFOs can give back valuable time to the accounting and finance teams to do more (and better) analyses and develop insights and strategies that can drive growth.
Leveraging Technology for Disclosure and Accounting Research
Accounting and finance teams evolve into their new roles.
Performing financial research to meet these new demands using the old-fashion, manual way should not be an option.
Accounting and finance professionals have traditionally gone to the SEC’s EDGAR website, searched for a peer company’s financial statements, and read through the documents to find the relevant information. Technology platforms, like idaciti's Disclosure Research, make this no longer necessary. Our platform employs machine learning to surface all the nuggets of financial information and potential hidden gems that you’re searching for. Besides, our platform has a set of built-in collaborative sharing functionalities that enables a team member to highlight and share the search results with the rest of the team who may not even have access to the platform.
idaciti also provides the functionality that allows various team members to 'like' and annotate the search results, so comments are linked directly to the documents, providing an efficient documentation trail. The real-time email notifications would push only the relevant information to your inbox whenever a new company discusses the specific topic or issue that you are precisely looking for.
Let the technology platform work for you 24/7.
Finally, the pièce de résistance, idaciti's Disclosure Research platform allows you to look at related and trending data while you are researching companies’ disclosures. By marrying both qualitative and quantitative information, you can optimize uncovering new insights and opportunities within the same platform.
No more wasting time going to EDGAR to painstakingly search through each company’s financial statements. No more wasting time taking screenshots of companies’ disclosures and attaching them to emails to collaborate with co-workers. No more spending hours trying to find great examples of company disclosures, and then having to spend more time to collect the related data to plot a chart to complement your research. No more questioning whether you might have missed some new information when you forget to go and search for this information.
What is Our Value Proposition for the CFO?
Using the idaciti Disclosure Research application can help the CFO and his/her teams stay on top of the latest information that the company is tracking without wasting time manually searching for the information. We are working for you and your team every second of the day. You can spread the cost of a subscription for the one or two team members across the entire accounting and finance teams who can benefit from this research and use it for additional analyses.
Working smarter is harder than merely working hard.
idaciti is making it easier to work smarter. It’s not difficult to see and experience the ROI on the idaciti Disclosure Research application - increase team efficiency to uncover growth opportunities and spread the cost of subscription over the entire accounting and finance team, or even the whole organization.
What CFO doesn’t love that?
Try idaciti Disclosure Research for free and see for yourself how it can save you countless hours in researching SEC disclosures.
Please contact info@idaciti.com to arrange a short introductory/on-boarding call and get free trial licenses of the idaciti Disclosure Research for you and your external reporting team. After the trial ends, you can still access idaciti Lite (interactive trending and benchmarking available) for as long as you like.
