You’ve taken on the CFO or finance leader role. You’re expected to bring clarity, set direction, and help shape the future of the business. But as you start reviewing systems, reporting cycles, and liquidity processes, it’s common to run into a significant problem. You can’t manage what you can’t see.
Cash is scattered across multiple bank portals. Reports are static, slow, and siloed. Forecasts are disconnected from actuals. You’re being asked to weigh in on hiring plans, capital allocation, or a potential acquisition, but the data you need to make those calls isn’t easily accessible or trustworthy.
But a lack of data information clarity or trust isn’t just frustrating, it’s a problem that undermines your ability to lead, especially given the changing nature of the CFO role. Because according to PwC, CFOs are “No longer confined to traditional responsibilities of number crunching and financial oversight…stepping into roles that demand strategic vision, technological acumen, and leadership in driving organisational change.”
Why Visibility Is the First Problem to Fix
Before you can guide the business, you need a clear view of it, which starts with finance and treasury. If you don’t have a live picture of how much cash is available, where it sits, or what’s going out the door, you can’t confidently support high-stakes decisions. Every conversation becomes a risk, because you’re working with incomplete information.
And the longer you wait to address it, the more credibility you lose. If your recommendations rely on delayed, error-prone data, you can’t expect stakeholders to trust your guidance. But the good news is that with the right systems, the problem is fixable. You don’t need a full ERP overhaul. You just need better infrastructure around visibility and reporting.
Here’s how to do it.
A Playbook for Building Visibility and Control as a New CFO
If you’ve stepped into a finance leadership role and are struggling to get a handle on liquidity, risk, and operational data, here’s where to focus first:
1. Centralize Cash Visibility Across All Accounts
Start by solving the most fundamental question: how much cash do we actually have? Most companies still rely on logging in to individual bank portals or waiting for batch file uploads to answer this.
Modern CFOs don’t have time for that. Using API-based bank connectivity gives you the ability to pull real-time balances and transactions into a single platform, without any manual intervention. It means your data collection and normalization is fully automated, and you can shift your focus from gathering data, to analyzing it.
With one source of truth, you can answer liquidity questions instantly, instead of waiting for static spreadsheets or cobbled-together reports.
2. Organize Your Data with Transaction Tagging
Once you’ve got the data flowing, you need to make it usable. Transaction tagging is a deceptively powerful way to automatically organize your data by entity, region, currency, and category.
Tagging allows you to slice and segment data in a way that aligns with how the business is structured and how decisions get made. You’ll be able to run more granular reports, create tailored dashboards, and support department heads and business units with the information they actually need.
Recommended: How Lemonade and Gibson Brands Transformed Treasury with Transaction Tagging
3. Build Modular Forecasts That Reflect the Real Business
As you know, your company isn’t a monolith. Blanket forecasts that treat the company as one unit are unlikely to be accurate, and certainly aren’t going to be insightful. Instead, the better approach is to build modular forecasts by entity, region, or business unit.
Forecasting this way mirrors how the company actually operates and how the board wants to see performance. You can roll these up into a consolidated view while retaining the flexibility to drill into specific areas or model different growth assumptions.
When forecasts reflect real-world structures and drivers, they become decision tools, not just reports.
4. Use Variance Tracking to Refine Assumptions Fast
Forecasting is only useful if you measure how accurate it is. Track forecast variance directly in your system and use it to refine assumptions.
Tracking variance isn’t just about data hygiene. It’s how you build trust. It shows the executive team and board that you’re not just projecting, you’re learning, adjusting, and improving visibility with every cycle.
5. Build a Unified Source Of Truth For Finance and Ops
Treasury doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Your ability to lead relies on collaboration with FP&A, accounting, and business operations. But too often, these teams are working from different datasets, assumptions, and tools.
When you centralize and clean treasury data, you create a shared language for decision-making. That improves speed, reduces errors, and eliminates the ‘who’s right?”’ debates that stall progress.
How the Costs Stack Up
Implementing a treasury platform like Trovata is a strategic investment. It’s not just about incremental improvements to process, but a fundamental change to the way the finance function interacts with the broader business. For new CFOs, the decision to make this investment often comes down to one key question, how quickly can this pay off?
The truth is, probably sooner than you think.
- Time saved – Treasury and accounting teams can reclaim 10–20 hours a week previously spent on manual data gathering, reconciliations, and spreadsheet reporting.
- Improved accuracy – Real-time data means fewer errors, faster course correction, and less risk of making decisions on stale numbers.
- More informed strategic decisions – With immediate visibility across entities, banks, and currencies, CFOs can confidently advise on capital allocation, investment timing, and liquidity strategy.
- Reduced reliance on headcount for growth enablement – Treasury can scale with the business without having to hire more analysts or support staff to manage growing complexity.
Many Trovata users report a return on investment within months, simply from eliminating inefficient processes and improving the quality of their decisions.
“With our previous TMS, there was a lot more involvement needed and time required to get everything implemented and set up correctly. With Trovata, we have saved over 12 hours a week from doing manual work, which is a big deal. As for the actual cost, we are saving way more than 50% of our annual contract fees.” —Niall Burke Global Treasury Manager at Eventbrite
Set the Tone With Better Insight
Your first quarter as CFO is all about establishing credibility with the right decisions that create fast impact. You need to set the tone, gain trust, and show you can lead with precision, and that starts with visibility.
When you can instantly answer critical questions, like how much cash do we have, where is it, and what’s coming next, you position yourself not just as a steward of capital, but as a strategic driver of the business.
Modern treasury tools like Trovata help you do that without delay. By removing friction from your data, streamlining forecasting, and giving you real-time visibility across every account, region, and entity, they let you hit the ground running without burning out your team or relying on stale spreadsheets.
Your insight is only as good as the tools behind it. If you want to move fast, move clearly, and make smarter calls from day one, it’s time to rethink what reporting should look like.
See how Trovata helps new CFOs take control from the start – book a demo today.
