As fiscal 2023 winds down, many companies and their financial leaders are casting their eye towards their plans for the next year and consolidating their strategies for growth.

For smaller companies especially, such expansion can often come with growing pains — making it critical to add new talent where needed as well as to ensure processes are running efficiently. For insurtech Cover Genius, the business and its team have responded “quite well” to the growth it’s seen in past years, “but we’re going to need to add additional skills,” David Rudow, CFO of insurtech Cover Genius said.

“With the way our business is and the global reach that we have, adding a treasury function is very important for us,” Rudow said in an interview. “It's also deepening the FP&A team.”

FP&A and the key to future planning  

Having “accuracy and being able to predict properly and forecast properly is important,” Rudow said of adding additional staff to the company’s financial planning and analysis team, citing his previous experience at public companies before he joined the New York-based insurtech in August.

Bringing 18 years of experience in private equity and venture-backed companies, Rudow previously served in top financial roles for companies including software firm Unite Us and cloud-based technology company nCino before taking on the top financial seat at Cover Genius. As CFO of the latter, he led the company’s initial public offering in 2020 and also helped to facilitate its $1.2 billion acquisition of SimpleNexus in 2021, according to a company press release.

Currently, there are two people on Cover Genius’ FP&A team, as well as two individuals on the corporate strategic side which assist with FP&A, he said.  

Having a robust FP&A team has grown in importance for CFOs in recent years as the finance function becomes increasingly data-driven — the team acts as something of a “corporate octopus,” experts previously told CFO Dive, with a presence in every part of the company to ensure they can provide a comprehensive view of the business.

“I think the importance of an FP&A team is being able to properly build out a plan,” Rudow said. For example, the team can help to examine the company’s revenues, where they’re coming from and where they expect to see them come from in the future, as well as where to potentially upsell.

“We have a high percentage of our revenues come from upsells to current customers,” he said. “What are the plans around upsells? How do we forecast upsells?”

A dedicated FP&A team can also help businesses navigate key areas such as headcount, an area that typically represents a high percentage of a company’s costs — helping to determine when the company is going to hire new employees or when to promote or raise an employee’s salary, for example.

“You just don't want any surprises,” Rudow said. “So I'd rather spend a lot of time with the FP&A team really stress-testing the model so that if something comes up, you can react quickly and make a change, whether it's pulling back on investing or there might be something where you say, we have this opportunity here, we can invest faster because we've already discussed some of these things.”

Pairing talent with tech

As well as building up its FP&A team, Cover Genius will also need to create a reporting team and develop an internal audit function — long-term adds the company will need to make down the road, Rudow said.

One of the key areas that Cover Genius will look to invest in as it looks towards the next fiscal year is bringing automation into key spaces  — the company relies on Excel at the moment, but a planning tool will “be one of the big things that we’ll be investing in,” Rudow said, by way of example. 

“As we look out towards the future and our planning for fiscal [20]24 is kicking off … it’s process controls, becoming more efficient and finding ways to do things in a more automated fashion,” he said.

CFOs have faced increasing difficulty finding top financial talent, with a shortage of accountants leading many to tap automation and emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence to plug key gaps. Software provider DataRails, for example, is testing out an automated FP&A tool for CFOs which is utilizing GenAI to provide answers in a conversational fashion, CFO Dive previously reported.

While talent shortages are ongoing, it’s important to find a balance between employees and automation — once talent is in place at the business that can run processes smoothly, then CFOs can look to augment those roles and processes with technology, Rudow said.

“I think once you have your team in place, and as a company continues to grow, you can offset that growth in headcount by automating and finding different ways to do things,” Rudow said.