Q&A: Inside Sage’s Blueprint for Growth-Ready Finance

Growth is the lifeblood of any business, but for the finance function, it can quickly turn into a source of profound complexity. As businesses expand, whether organically or through acquisition, finance leaders find themselves at the epicenter of a management challenge: how to scale operations and expectations without losing control, clarity, or confidence in the numbers.

In a Q&A with us, Marvin Fletcher Rogers, Principal Consultant & Head of Business Development at Sage, shared his perspective on how Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) can effectively navigate this delicate balancing act focusing on strategy, trust, and the smart application of technology.

Early Warning Signs of Financial Strain

The first step in staying ahead of the curve is recognising the signs that your finance function is struggling to keep pace with business growth. Fletcher Rogers, whose work with private equity-backed scaling companies gives him a unique vantage point, points to a clear set of symptoms:

• Siloed Processes and Functions: As individuals become teams, and teams become functions, natural silos emerge. What once worked when everyone had common-sense clarity on the business’s direction changes as departments are forced to make independent decisions.
• A “Truckload of Systems”: This siloed nature often leads to multiple systems and processes being used to solve the same challenges, creating natural inefficiency.
• Over-reliance on Spreadsheets: While spreadsheets always have a place, relying on them for core business processes is a major risk. This leads to duplication of effort, untimely information, and inaccuracies that scale quickly.
• Lack of Confidence in the Numbers: The ultimate symptom is getting the numbers but not having 100% clarity and confidence in them. This is especially critical when reporting to external stakeholders, such as the board, investors, or auditors.

To get ahead, finance leaders must address these fundamental process and system issues before they become debilitating bottlenecks.

Moving Beyond “Real-Time for Real-Time’s Sake”

Many finance teams aspire to “real-time data,” but most still operate on a month-end cycle. Fletcher Rodgers states that true real-time decision-making requires more than just speed; it demands depth and accuracy.

“Seeing a P&L real-time is great, but actually it’s inefficient if in that P&L, if there are components that are not being managed real-time,”. For example, if cost allocation is still done at the end of the month, that “real-time P&L” can be misleading if ran off-cycle.

For data to be truly potent and valuable, it must be relevant and pertinent to the business. This means focusing on segmentation and allocation to ensure the metrics are correctly governed and reflect the appropriate level of apportionment before you even worry about how fast you can close the books. If real-time information lacks this deep dimensional “sanity,” it won’t be trusted to drive decision-making.

Where Automation Delivers Meaningful Relief

When asked to do more without increasing headcount, automation is the only sustainable answer. Rogers suggests breaking automation into two segments: optimising current processes and building for future scale.

Low-Hanging Fruit for Immediate Impact

For scaling businesses with organic growth, the most effective relief comes from maximising the Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) or Procure-to-Pay (P2P) cycles.

• Impact on Cash Flow: Shortening these cycles maximises or shortens the time required, directly tying to cash flow and providing the working capital needed to operate in a dynamic environment.
• Better Experience: A faster Q2C cycle often means a better customer experience, while better insight into purchasing can lead to supplier discounts and improved supplier relationships.

The key to achieving this is having integrated systems—connecting your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to your finance system, and ensuring all tools (for expenses, payments, etc.) are connected to manage payments faster.

Building for Perpetual Scale with AI

For the future, the two letters that provide a nearly infinite ability to scale are AI (Artificial Intelligence).

However, the finance world requires scrutiny and assurance, making the “black box” approach of agents and workflows a tough sell. Therefore, an authentic AI strategy for finance must be built on three concentric circles:

1. Continuous Assurance: Getting the governance and controls right is the foundational step. You must be confident the data is being collected correctly.
2. Continuous Accounting: Once assurance is established, you can automate with confidence.
3. Continuous Insights: This is the ultimate payoff, creating a perpetual flywheel where the foundation is correct, the process is governed, and the output is the future-proofed ability to deliver more with fewer resources.

As Rogers summarises, finance leaders must shift from a reactive state, simply manual effort to a position of meaningful impact.

Streamlining Multi-Entity Consolidation

Consolidation is one of the toughest, yet most critical, jobs for growing firms, and the complexity scales across domestic, global, and M&A scenarios. The typical bottleneck involves dumping Trial Balances (TBs) from multiple systems into spreadsheets.

An efficient close, therefore, is rooted in technology that eliminates this manual pain:

• Single Platform Environment: Having a single platform that can manage all entities within the same environment, such as a multi-entity and multi-dimensional system, automatically removes much of the natural pain associated with managing separate entities.
• Global Complexity: For cross-border, multi-currency operations, the system must not only track the impact of currency but also the impact of transactions for different reporting standards (e.g., IFRS vs. US GAAP).
• M&A Readiness: In the case of inorganic growth, a flexible system ensures that acquiring an entity with a different tech stack or chart of accounts doesn’t necessitate an entire system overhaul.

Ultimately, getting consolidation right provides the deep, rich insight needed to drive commercial outcomes such as identifying which product in which region with which customer cohort works best, turning a compliance chore into an investment decision driver.

The Practical Path to Better Visibility for Mid-Market CFOs

For scaling CFOs operating with tighter budgets and more modest technical skills, the debate between “end-to-end” and “best-of-breed” systems is critical.

Rogers advises adopting an environment that allows for a best-in-class approach, provided the systems are API-enabled and can “play nicely with each other”. This approach offers several advantages:

• Flexibility: It allows the organization to solve problems as and when they become most critical, without being locked into a rigid tech stack that may not pivot with the business.
• Prioritisation: You can prioritize investments to put out the most pertinent “fire”for instance, an Accounts Receivable (AR) problem without immediately investing in a multi-year project to get “absolutely everything” into one platform.

While a strong core finance system remains the essential foundation, the ability to bring in different specialized tools that plug into that core platform as needed provides the most practical and budget-conscious path to greater visibility.

Maintaining Governance Without Slowing Down

Scaling means that the demand for information, and the scrutiny applied to it, will only increase. To meet audit expectations and maintain strong oversight, CFOs must build the muscle memory of good governance early on.

Governance is not just a checkbox for future IPOs or fundraising; it is a driver of scale.

• Future-Proofing: Getting governance right, and building your finance function on a sound data foundation gives your business the best chance of leveraging future AI tools and LLMs (Large Language Models). These future technologies will have a much better chance of solving your problems if your data structure is sound.
• Antidote to Uncertainty: Good governance lends itself to deeper, richer insights. In an environment of constant uncertainty, segmented, relevant data is a powerful antidote. Knowing your unit economics or profitability across specific regions and customer cohorts allows for confident investment decisions, such as which region to expand to or which products to double down on.

The ultimate aim for the modern finance leader is to achieve the correct balance between agility and control, ensuring the foundations built today support the trust and impact required tomorrow.

Comments are closed.