The role of the CFO in the modern business world is changing every day. These leaders are no longer siloed among their teams – CFOs are tasked with touching every part of the organization, ensuring that costs remain in check while mar gins are maximized.
These new responsibilities cannot be achieved by relying on the same methods and techniques that CFOs of yesteryear leaned on. Rather, financial executives need to have dynamic, cutting-edge tools and partnerships that allow them to deliver results quarter after quarter.
Data Means the World
To help understand the challenges that the modern CFO faces and how they can overcome them, ERP Today sat down for an exclusive interview with Lee An Schommer, Chief Product Officer and General Manager, ERP Reporting and BI at insightsoftware.
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Schommer emphasized the importance of data in empowering CFOs to be able to perform at their best.
“We know that CFOs are now becoming the arbiter of truth around the health of the business. If I’m a CFO and I care about all the data. I don’t just care about financial reporting. I care about the supply chain and operational data,” said Schommer.
To drive the performance of their finance teams, CFOs need to be able to access clean, accurate data above all else. This allows them to make timely, informed decisions that drive business performance and reduce risk.
In the volatile economic environment in which organizations must now operate, financial leaders are expected to go beyond reporting historical results — they must proactively guide strategy, optimize cash flow, and support agile responses to emerging challenges.
Real-time data enables CFOs to monitor KPIs, detect financial anomalies early, and identify trends that influence forecasting, budgeting, and resource allocation.
Without real-time insights, CFOs risk basing decisions on outdated or incomplete information, leading to missed opportunities or costly errors. Accu rate data also strengthens stakeholder confidence, ensures compliance with financial regulations, and improves internal governance. For example, during financial close or audits, immediate access to reconciled, validated numbers reduces delays and increases transparency.
Moreover, as companies adopt digital finance transformations, real-time visibility across operations becomes essential for managing working capital, aligning with ESG goals, and supporting enterprise-wide automation initiatives.
In essence, real-time data empowers CFOs to shift from reactive to strategic leadership—supporting innovation, operational excellence, and long-term value creation in a rapidly evolving business landscape.
Flexibility and Connectivity are Paramount
Organizations often seek to strengthen their positions and expand operations through mergers and acquisitions. This presents numerous challenges for finance teams – many of which can be handled by complementing and extending existing ERP systems by connecting to their data.
This is a major reason why insight software focuses on out-of-the-box connectivity. It can integrate with a wide array of systems, including major ERP platforms like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Dynamics, as well as over 140 other ERPs and EPMs, and modern cloud data sources.
This capability is particularly valuable for companies that are highly acquisitive or operate with multiple, potentially legacy, ERP systems and need to bring all that data together to manage their business. The company’s pre-built connectors allow them to achieve this faster than others.
“Let’s say your company has nine in stances of ECC and they are so customized because SAP said we can make you whatever you want. All of these different notes, like you’ve just customized ECC. The idea of breaking all of that does not sound great. One of the things that we do is we enable you to treat ECC like an Infor like a snowflake data base. You don’t move all of it. We can let you run in parallel and create and make sure that everything moves over and stays intact. It makes it easier to rip the Band-Aid off and figure out how to rebuild everything if you go for a period of time where you’re just treating it like a third party instance,” said Schommer.
Strategic Priorities
Looking ahead, Schommer highlighted some of the strategic priorities her organization has and how those dovetail with the important work that modern CFOs are seeking to accomplish.
- Adopt Meaningful AI: In 2025, AI is everywhere. While it can be helpful, the hype has often surpassed the deliverables. This is why Schommer emphasizes “meaningful AI.” Companies should seek out AI that solves real productivity challenges, particularly for the Office of the CFO, rather than just adding AI as a feature for marketing purposes.
“One thing we are focusing on more and more is AI that is focused on the office of the CFO’s challenges. Getting the right pre-built content, analyzing the data, spitting it out and actually having it inform my model my business model, and creating a report for me based on the following dynamic. We’re really doing more and more on the AI front and getting into agentic AI,” said Schommer.
AI is most effective when it is able to automate tasks like pulling reports, analyzing data to inform business models, and using agentic use cases to proactively schedule reporting and highlight anomalies or changes in data sources.
- Maximize the Migration Journey: The migration from legacy ERP systems to newer versions or cloud platforms is a significant focus for many companies around the world. These businesses are facing man dates or incentives to move as ERP vendors are increasingly pushing them towards newer solutions. Schommer says insightsoftware aims to provide “safe passage” for reporting and analytics during these migrations.
A crucial part of this is ensuring report portability. insightsoftware allows customers to run their legacy and new systems in parallel during the transition, while still being able to bring clean data together. This diminishes the difficulty of migrating heavily customized systems, like multiple instances of a customized ERP, by treating the legacy system like a third-party instance.
Beyond just technical connectivity, insightsoftware also offers consulting services around process optimization, using tools like process mining and data mapping to help customers improve workflows during migration, countering the tendency to simply replicate old, potentially inefficient, processes in the new system. It aims to help make the business case for migration more compelling by mitigating costs and risks and increasing benefits
- Find ERP-Focused Solutions: Companies should seek out partners that work to understand their business challenges and offer a comprehensive set of capabilities tailored to their specific ERP environment. These ERP-focused solutions help businesses to streamline operations, reduce silos within their teams, and provide visibility to all relevant parties.
Solution and Product Portfolio
insightsoftware’s solutions connect to and make sense of data, boosting business performance with smart data solutions. The portfolio covers various areas critical to the Office of the CFO and broader business operations:
- Budgeting & Planning: Solutions to streamline and automate planning processes, improve data quality, enhance decision-making, support continuous planning, and integrate with ERPs/ EPMs.
- Operational Reporting & Analytics: Solutions for informed day-to-day decision-making and optimizing operations across various business areas like supply chain, manufacturing, sales, and marketing. It offers built-in ERPSmarts and self-ser vice capabilities. Products include Angles Professional and Angles Enterprise for Oracle.
- Financial Reporting: Solutions specifically designed for finance professionals to access and analyze ERP data efficiently, provide strategic guidance, understand the business state, and save time through automation. These tools allow users to pull real-time ERP data into formats like Excel or Web reports, often with drill-down capabilities, without needing technical expertise.
- Close & Consolidation: Solutions to automate and accelerate the financial close process, ensuring accuracy and compliance. They help reduce close time, improve data quality, handle com plex consolidation scenarios (multiple entities, currencies), and provide performance insights.
- Tax & Compliance: Solutions to optimize tax and compliance management, offering faster processing and a single source of truth. Capabilities include supporting tax provisioning, country by-country reporting, BEPS Pillar 2, and transfer pricing.
- Accounting & Treasury: Solutions to manage complex financial data, comply with regulations, and optimize performance. This area includes streamlining equity administration and reporting (cap table management, ESPPs), and consolidating IFRS 16 lease data for compliant reporting.
- Embedded Analytics: Solutions designed for ISVs to integrate data-driven features like interactive dashboards and reports directly into their own applications, providing self-service analytics to their end users. Logi Symphony is highlighted as a product built for this purpose.
- Automation & Data Management: Solutions to speed up processes, con solidate data from multiple sources in real-time, and manage data efficiently. Capabilities include automating manual ERP processes, managing master data, and streamlining product information management.
These solutions leverage the power of data to enable better decisions, improve efficiency, reduce errors, and save time, integrating with existing ERP and EPM systems.
Finding the Financial Future
Though there are challenges, modern CFOs can look ahead to a bright future. Finding solutions through partners like insightsoftware can help businesses to navigate complex data landscapes, particularly those centered around multiple ERP systems.
By leveraging exciting capabilities reporting, analytics, and advanced data management solutions, finance leaders can make smarter decisions more quickly than ever before.
