It’s official – chief financial officers are just “over-hyped” spreadsheet masters
Are you a chief financial officer (CFO)? Probably best to stop reading here.
That’s because far from being the eyes, ears, brains and brawn of the operation, a heartbeat away from the top job and a driver of company strategy, a new survey has found CFOs are little more than “over-hyped" glorified spreadsheet wizzes.
According to a survey of 762 of them, conducted by the FSN Modern Finance Forum, finance chiefs feel they spend too much time on basic accounting and don’t have time to get to grips with the bigger aspects of actually running a business.
Read more: CFOs not feeling good about 2016
The FSN found CFOs were, simply “adding values in spreadsheets [and] being bogged down by very traditional role requirements.”
More than half of said they spent too much time on actually processing transactions. Two-thirds said they were drowning in data, failing to understand all the different facts and figures coming their way, with one in three admitting that they made business decisions based on nothing more than “gut feel”.
Perhaps that explains why top accountants are as worried as everybody else about the rise of the robots. The survey also revealed that 52 per cent of CFOs thought their jobs were “threatened by automation”.
Read more: The robot revolution is coming
They might be onto something. The calculator has been around a while, but the latest wave of technology does seem to be putting a dent in the career prospects of wannabe number pushers.
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) the army of people working in “financial and insurance activities” is the same level it was in 1999.