Does this sound familiar to you?
You are a smart, even brilliant, finance professional. But much of the work you do each day is …samey.
It’s almost like there are multiple low toner versions of you.
Each of these versions does manual tasks.
Invoice collection. Chasing data. Checking which version of your Excel file is the “final, final, final version.”
You wanted to be a strategic finance leader.
But the manual clone work takes over.
It is not even effective.
The clone grind creates more wrong numbers, poor storytelling, and daily Excel version control issues.
What Is the #Notaclone Movement?
The “Not a Clone” movement has been organized by Datarails, the FP&A solution for Excel users. The movement unites 10 tech companies who sell to CFOs, alongside CFOs themselves, and finance influencers.
The movement is urging finance departments to unleash their strategic value rather than acting as “poor clones of themselves”.
An online petition to “Make finance teams strategic leaders, not poor clones of themselves” has already been signed by nearly 300 people including CEOs, COOs, and CFOs.
The Impact of Finance Clone (Some Numbers)
The movement comes as 88% of finance leaders say they are held back from having a greater role in driving innovation in their companies (Microsoft, 2023 Future of Finance Trends Report). In addition, 81% of CFOs believe they suffer from the most intensive daily manual work compared to any other role in the C-suite.
Meet the companies behind Not a Clone
CFO Tech companies who have added their voice to the campaign include Chargebee, Tipalti, Mesh Payments, PayEm, Beebole, Vertice, and Quolum.
Charlotte Wright, Financial Controller, Vertice says: “Finance leaders have a million things to do — we shouldn’t be spending time on manual processes like negotiating and contract management. If we can leverage technology with the confidence that it is doing these tasks as well or better than we could, it allows us to put our energy into the things that really matter.”
CEO and co-founder Yves Hiernaux of Beebole, adds: “We don’t have the luxury of consuming our resources and time with manual data processing, so if companies want to stay competitive, it comes down to how (and how quickly) we can process and analyze the facts before us.”
Rob Israch, President, Tipalti adds: “Skilled finance teams shouldn’t be spending their time on manual payment runs and data entry. By automating the entire payables process, you can reduce your workload by 80% and put your team in charge.”
Meanwhile signatories to the petition include Anders Liu Lindberg, Partner, and COO at the Business Partnering Institute; Paul Barnhurst, a former FP&A leader at Amex; Aliyyah Abdullah, a finance leader at Recycling Council of B.C, Soufyan Hamid formerly a finance leader at telecoms company Proximus and Deloitte, and Christian Wattig, an ex-Unilever FP&A leader. Together these finance influencers have more than 375,000 LinkedIn followers.
The movement will include billboard campaigns, social media promotions and a new video advert.