How confident are you in your financial forecasts?

How confident are you in your financial forecasts? If you’re like some CFOs I know, maybe you’re more confident than you should be!

After analyzing thousands of contracts at Concord, we discovered something surprising: most forecasts miss a full 31% of actual financial commitments.

That’s a lot of revenue to leave on the table.

Why does this happen? The good news is that it’s not because your Finance team is incompetent. The bad news: It’s because you’re building forecasts based on historical spending patterns, instead of on data about your current contractual obligations.

Think about it: Your contracts already tell you how much money is flowing into and out of your business. They tell you when that money moves, and for how long.

So it’s astonishing to me that 75% of companies we talk to can’t answer basic questions about their contractual commitments without a manual contract review.

That’s a disconnect that costs your company major money:

• Your salespeople sign deals with volume discounts your Finance team doesn’t track.
• Your procurement team auto-renews with vendors nobody actually uses, because they don’t notice the upcoming renewal date.
• Your CFO makes investment decisions based on out-of-date forecasts that don’t reflect your current obligations.

The solution, thankfully, is simple: Get visibility into your contractual obligations, now!

Fifteen years ago, back when I was working at France’s second-largest telecom company, I had to spend six agonizing months reviewing thousands of vendor contracts, building spreadsheets just to understand what we’d committed to. That experience taught me a hard lesson: Everyone needs to see what they’re committing to in their contracts.

And that’s why we built Concord: To help leaders like you extract financial insights from the untapped goldmine of your current contracts. They’re just sitting around on hard drives and in the cloud, so why not get actionable data out of them? With Concord, this only takes a few minutes.

Just as IT leaders evolved from “the people who plug in computers” to strategic partners, the role of the CFO is evolving, too. Finance leaders are taking central roles in connecting and optimizing all business processes, across the whole organization. And contracts are right at the heart of it all.

This is why we built Concord: Because a contract isn’t just a legal document. It’s a financial blueprint.

Isn’t it time you built your forecasts on what’s really in your contracts?

Matt Lhoumeau is the CEO and co-founder of Concord, a leading provider of Agreement Intelligence solutions. Concord empowers growing businesses to make smarter operational decisions by unlocking actionable insights from contracts, and is trusted by over 1,500 companies worldwide.