Going with your gut’ often results in poor decision making

While experience should be valued, ‘going with your gut’ isn’t the best way to make executive decisions for a company. However, recent research showed that a surprising 33% of senior finance professionals believe their organization’s decisions relied too heavily on ‘gut feel’ rather than hard data. This leads to poor decision-making:

Companies that rely too much on gut feel in decision-making only accurately forecast 22%  of the time, compared with 50% for companies that have a better balance of instinct and data.

Many CFOs rely on gut feel because they do not have confidence that they can access accurate data quickly. Instead CFOs struggle with data silos or fragmented systems architectures that require the gathering and validating data, leaving little time left for the kind of analysis that can lead to business insights.

Technology can help CFOs access data where and when they need it

Using appropriate business technology and specialist finance applications to link financial and non-financial data greatly supports finance’s ability to deliver facts quickly rather than resorting to gut feel. For example, when an Aptitude Software client, a large consumer financial services organization, needed to understand why late fees for lending had tripled, they were able to quickly analyze the late fee income by credit score band, geography, product and demographic to determine how to proceed.  Having a centralized, validated source of data meant the decision-makers had everything they needed at hand to decide how to proceed.

How do you stack up to your finance peers? Download the full report to find out.