Economic factors affecting CFO staying power, compensation and pain points are at their most pressing for a generation, according to a recent analysis by DataRail, a financial planning and analysis platform.
Five things to know:
1. Common challenges CFOs faced during the pandemic included low consumer demand, staffing shortages, working capital, liquidity, cash flow and supply chain slowdown, according to the report. However, some of these challenges have been overtaken by price pressures, adapting to changing consumer or patient demands and increasing risk exposure.
2. Average CFO compensation — involving salary, bonuses, stock awards and options — increased from $2.4million to $3.5 million from 2016 to 2021, the latest period for which official data exists, according to DataRails' analysis of 2,056 companies. The $1.1 million increase equates to a 40 percent jump over the five-year period.
3. In terms of average annual compensation, healthcare CFOs ($2 million) ranked 19th among 26 sectors evaluated in the analysis. CFOs in the cable and satellite industry topped the list with an average compensation of $8.1 million, and CFOs in education sat at the bottom of the list, taking home $1.1 million on average.
4. Despite reports of layoffs across various industries, including healthcare, staffing — or more specifically, retention, talent availability and hiring — continues to dominate CFOs' list of internal worries, according to a recent Deloitte survey.
5. An ongoing CFO pain point in getting things done is manual work, according to the report. More than half of CFOs pointed to financial planning and analysis (52 percent) and information technology (50 percent) as the capabilities that most require investment to help them get the job done. A previous Datarails study found that U.S. finance chiefs consider themselves to have the most painful manual processes within the entire C-Suite.
Click here for more details on the analysis.