This post first appeared in early 2023, when inflation, recession fears and layoffs dominated every finance agenda. We have rewritten it for 2026 readers. The headlines have moved on, but the five challenges a chief financial officer (CFO) carries have not: protecting cash, backing innovation, controlling risk, running a distributed team and planning for a future that keeps changing shape.
Each of those challenges depends on data that usually sits outside the finance system: in contracts, purchase orders, supplier records and invoices. Below, we look at each challenge in turn and at the practical moves that help finance leaders answer it with evidence rather than estimates.
Why do these challenges keep coming back?
Finance leaders sit in the middle of the business. They answer for spending they did not approve, commitments they did not negotiate and payments that depend on other teams doing their part. When the economy tightens, the pressure arrives all at once: the board wants costs held, suppliers want to raise prices and customers want longer payment terms.
Raising prices is rarely an easy answer, because customers push back. So the lever most finance teams reach for is efficiency: spend less to do the same work, catch errors earlier and stop paying for things the business did not agree to. That work is only as good as the information behind it, which is why the same five challenges keep returning whatever the headline of the year.
1. How can finance improve cash flow?
Cash flow stays at the top of most finance agendas. Real time cash forecasts, analytics on days sales outstanding and days payable outstanding, and predictive models for late payers have all become standard tools. Yet many teams still lose cash in places those dashboards do not show.
Where cash quietly leaks
- Invoices paid at a rate higher than the contract allows
- Duplicate invoices that slip through when the same supplier bills twice
- Early payment discounts written into contracts but never taken
- Service credits owed by suppliers that nobody claims
- Auto renewals that roll over because nobody saw the notice date
Each of these is a contract question as much as a finance one. The fix is to check invoices against the governing contract before payment, not after. With Invoiceflow, each invoice is matched to its purchase order and contract terms, and anything outside those terms waits for a person to approve it.
2. What does innovation look like for a finance team?
Finance is expected to help the business spot opportunities early and change course quickly. That calls for scenario models, better key performance indicators and forecasts that update as conditions change. The risk is that innovation turns into more tools and more reports that nobody reads.
A better test is whether finance can answer hard questions faster. Which suppliers can raise prices next quarter? Which contracts let us exit early? How much of our spend is under agreements with price protection? These used to take weeks of manual review. With AI that reads contracts, such as Avy, they become questions a finance analyst can ask and have answered with a citation to the clause.
Innovation in finance should also be led by process, not by technology alone. Decide which decisions you want to make better, then pick the tools that support them.
3. How should finance strengthen risk and compliance?
Controllership and compliance sit close behind cash on most finance priority lists, and exposure keeps widening: cybersecurity, data privacy, sanctions, supplier failure and new reporting rules. Much of that exposure is written into supplier contracts, in clauses on data handling, insurance, audit rights and liability.
- Know your obligations. Keep a live register of what each contract commits both sides to, with owners and dates.
- Control the payment gate. Make sure no invoice is paid to a supplier that has not completed onboarding checks.
- Keep the audit trail. Record who approved what, and why, so an auditor can follow any payment back to its contract.
- Retrain, do not just automate. People who used to key data should move into review, exception handling and analysis.
Tools such as Obligationflow track commitments after signature, and Onboardingflow checks suppliers before the first purchase order. Both leave the decisions with your team.
4. How do you run finance well in a hybrid workplace?
Hybrid work is now simply how many finance teams operate. Approvers sit in different offices and time zones, and invoices arrive by email, portal and post. When the process depends on someone walking a file to the next desk, it breaks.
The answer is a shared workflow everyone works from: one queue for invoices, one record per supplier and one history for every approval. Flexible location policies help retain good people, but only if the work itself is visible to whoever needs to pick it up. Running finance workflows on a platform the company already uses, such as ServiceNow, means people do not have to learn a separate system. See built on ServiceNow.
5. How should planning and analysis change?
Financial planning and analysis has been one of the busiest areas of finance investment for years. Artificial intelligence and better data platforms now make it possible to bring operational data into the plan instead of relying on last year's numbers plus a percentage.
Contracts are one of the most useful inputs and one of the most overlooked. They hold renewal dates, price escalators, volume commitments and termination rights. When those terms feed the forecast, planners can see a price increase coming months before it lands on an invoice.
| Planning question | Where the answer lives |
|---|---|
| What will we pay suppliers next year? | Price and escalation clauses |
| Which costs can we cut quickly? | Termination and notice terms |
| Where are we committed to minimum spend? | Volume and commitment clauses |
| Which renewals need a decision this quarter? | Renewal and notice dates |
Change management matters here too. Shocks from geopolitics and industry disruption are now routine, so planning has to become a habit of regular revision rather than a once a year exercise.
Where should a finance leader start?
- Pick the challenge that costs you most today, usually cash leakage or audit exposure
- Find where the data for it lives, often in contracts and supplier records rather than the ledger
- Connect that data to the workflow where decisions are made, such as invoice approval
- Measure against your own baseline before you expand to the next challenge
The people who do this well treat finance as the owner of evidence. They do not need every system replaced. They need contract terms, supplier status and invoice data in one place, with people deciding and software doing the reading. For a related view, see closing the gap between procurement and accounts payable.
The bottom line
The economic backdrop changes every year, but finance leaders keep facing the same five challenges. Each one gets easier when the commitments in your contracts are visible to finance and checked before money moves. Build the right people and data around that, and finance can steer the business with confidence.