FinOps, or finance operations, refers to an increasingly strategic function made up of finance automation specialists, tools, and processes to help businesses streamline and optimize day-to-day finance tasks in order to save time and money. Finance automation technology helps eliminate monotonous, manual work that hinders business innovation in favor of agile, automated processes.
Automating lower value tasks, such as expense management, enables finance departments to save time while maintaining control and accountability. Through a deeper integration of finance and business operations, combined with operational rigor, FinOps allows finance to become a strategic partner for the rest of the business, rather than a bottleneck.
For years, finance teams have been bogged down with tedious day-to-day tasks that take up the majority of their valuable time. But thanks to FinOps, CFOs and finance leaders are now able to devote more time to strategic collaboration and activities that can boost their ROI.
FinOps emerged as a part-time function held by key team members such as accountants, controllers, etc. It has historically been reactive, e.g. chasing employees for receipts, coding transactions, and inputting invoice line items into accounting systems, with a focus on reducing cloud technology spend.
It applied financial best practices and partnered with engineering to help organizations optimize cloud computing costs and efficiency. This initial narrow definition of FinOps signified a shift in businesses of combining finance with new technologies to improve efficiency. Prior to this, departments were siloed, with each operating independently of one another.
However, FinOps is now being redefined to encompass more than financial accountability with cloud spend. It is now a combination of financial and operational excellence that empowers finance teams to seize control of their time and money and focus more on unit economics and value, and less on repetitious projects. It’s leading more and more finance leaders to think about how to apply rigor and accountability to other types of spend as well.
FinOps, powered by finance automation, enables the following:
FinOps helps lead to more efficient unit economics for businesses through:
RevOps, or revenue operations, refers to processes that are built to support increased revenue flow. It is a holistic, full-funnel approach to enhance every facet of the customer journey. Examples of RevOps in action include improving customer touchpoints, consolidating revenue tools, and eliminating department silos. While both FinOps and RevOps are designed to drive revenue, FinOps does so by streamlining finance workflows while RevOps optimizes go-to-market workflows.
You should consider adding FinOps to your business if:
Ready to work more effectively? Check out the pages below for best practices on setting up your FinOps.