Surprises can be fun—unless you're a finance leader. If you're sitting in the CFO seat at an Ag input distributor or retailer, surprises are your worst nightmare.

Margin surprises. Missed expectations for sales or profit numbers. Unexpected inventory positions. Unhappy branch or regional managers surprised by their annual bonus.

If you're a finance leader in this industry, you're hit with these jolts all the time. Yet you still have to be the one to turn those shocks into great decisions. Even as the ground shifts under your feet, you still have to keep the business informed and profitable.

We get that struggle. And it's easy to see how this chaotic environment gets built. Procurement and pricing departments are running everything off static and/or manually updated Excel spreadsheets. Upstream data issues only get bigger downstream, as they make their way to you.

As a finance leader, you likely don't spend your days in the nitty-gritty of inputting data, making calculations, or fixing errors. But you are responsible for making decisions based on the big-picture reports that that work generates.

Your job is to take huge swaths of individual data points -- and turn them into a cohesive picture, forecast the future, and make decisions to improve your organization's profitability. You need to predict profitability for the full year, understand the business's cash cycle, and more. No pressure.

With Smartwyre, the financial reporting and visibility that your role depends on can be more robust, accurate, and stress-free.

Here’s what a finance department can do when it’s powered by Smartwyre software:

1. Enjoy an easier accrual process

Surprises on your books: the absolute last thing you want at the end of the year.

Distributors and retailers that use Smartwyre get access to regular earnings overviews. This report is a clear picture of exactly how much you’re owed in rebate payments and how much has already been paid.

You get to keep a clear, accurate view over where your earnings stand in real time. And with more timely, correct data sets month by month, you can feel confident that your accruals at the end of the year are accurate too.

2. Better understand margins and true costs

For a leader in finance, there aren’t many words more important than “margin.” Understanding — and maximizing — yours requires in-depth data, though. The less information you have about where profit is coming from, where there are opportunities for more, and where money is potentially being wasted, the more your overall financial strategy is going to suffer.

With Smartwyre, all this info is right at your fingertips. Through Smartwyre’s powerful software, you can better understand the true cost of a product and have a better view of where you have room to move in the marketplace. Armed with that info, you can better set your outbound market price and get closer to your target margins.

3. Reduce reliance on manual calculation or management by your team

As the CFO or finance manager, you may not have your hands in manual data input, adjustments, or management. But your team probably does. So when you can lighten some of that load, they — and your margins — will thank you.

When finance teams manage everything via Excel spreadsheets, all that manual data input leaves room for error. Each of those individual errors have to be fixed manually by someone on your team. Or, you risk those mistakes snowballing later into inaccurate margins or pricing.

With software like Smartwyre that can automatically calculate allocations, you can reduce the time-consuming work heaped onto your team — and drive more accurate results.

4. Improve your overall financial picture — and financial decision-making

We’ve talked before about the importance of organizational data health. The Ag input industry needs it now more than ever, and Smartwyre’s platform gives organizations the tools to prioritize that data health.

But empowered financial decision-making doesn’t just come from accuracy. It also requires access to in-depth data, so you can pinpoint trends, identify opportunities, and see where money is potentially flying out the back door. That robust, 30,000-foot view over all your financial data is what Smartwyre provides.

Beyond earnings overviews and true cost metrics, custom reporting is also available inside Smartwyre that can show program comparisons, year-over-year changes, forecast comparisons, and more.

It’s a treasure trove for any finance leader or CFO looking for patterns and numbers that can lead them to even better profitability in the future.

When your business can truly trust its data, finance leaders can trust the decisions they make based on that data. And that’s the foundation of healthier, more profitable businesses.

If you’re a finance leader in the Ag input supply chain looking for software that can improve your financial reporting, decision-making, and profitability, talk to our team today, or watch one of our webinars to get a better feel for the Smartwyre platform.