A CFO Discusses Her Model For Aligning Strategy With Finance | Céline Dufétel, CFO, Checkout.com

And then how do you actually measure it and measure that it’s having the impact that you really want to have? And one of the things that I think is incredibly important for a finance organization is to connect business metrics with financial outcomes. Because that’s how you really can then talk to the organization and get the organization in motion. An operations organization understands their operational metrics. A commercial organization understands their commercial metrics. How do you take these sets of metrics, directly connect them to financial metrics, and help people understand why are you giving a certain amount of budget? Why are you driving in a certain direction? Why is your pricing structures influencing how you’re driving the commercial org? And so for me, that’s been really successful to have those teams collaborate closely together and bring the accounting talent closer to the strategy talent and vice versa and cross pollinate each other in terms of what they’re teaching each other.

CFOTL: Great. Is there a way the visibility into data those different groups have, do they share a common, whether it’s a dashboard or it’s just some access that they have to certain numbers or metrics? Is that preexisting before you arrived? Or is there something you’ve done to enhance how they’re accessing and sharing information?

Dufétel: Yes, so one of the things I really like to do is make sure that everybody is using the exact same definitions. Sometimes you’ll walk into an organization, they’ll say, “Well that’s finance definition of a client going live, or that’s operations definition.” There really shouldn’t be that, right? The whole organization needs to talk about data, talk about metrics in the same way, and use the same definitions and then ultimately the same numbers. Because if we don’t talk the same language, I don’t know how we can all drive towards the same outcome that we’re trying to drive to. So one of the things that I’ve worked on here, but I’ve worked on in my other roles as well, is making sure that we’re all aligned, we’re all looking at the same data. Whatever is the sales pipeline is also the pipeline that finance uses. Whatever is our view of our win rates, whatever is our view of our profitability per client, whatever is our view of share of wallet, whatever is our view of any kind of critical commercial metric, the time it takes for a client to go live. It’s the same that we look across so that we can align on what are the right OKRs, what are the right goals for the organization? And then we can measure those outcomes, right? ‘Cause if you’re not measuring, you’re much less likely to be making progress, obviously.