For well more than a decade now, business publications, consulting firms, technology vendors, and research firms have issued a steady stream of articles and commentary heralding the arrival of a new era for the finance function. No longer solely occupied with control, compliance, and reporting, finance has become a player in performance management, strategy, operational improvement, and digital transformation. By marshaling ever-increasing masses of data and tapping the power of analytics to glean insights from disparate forms of information, the finance function is poised to lead the organization into the digital future, discovering new forms of value creation along the way.

Or so the commentary has promised. In fact, the digital future is still a long way off at many finance organizations. At those organizations, manual data entry and processes, paper receipts, and spreadsheets are still how most business gets done, and advanced digital tools are unknown or rarely used. In other words, many finance teams fall far short of data and analytics maturity.