In a recent interview with CFO East Africa, Shital Shah the CEO of Adili Group reckons how she had a love for numbers which inspired her to pursue accounting and she went on to graduate with a qualification as a chartered certified accountant (FCCA) from Emile Woolf College in the UK and joined Coopers and Lybrand a year later in Nairobi.
She began as a practice manager at Anjarwalla and Khanna Advocates and went on to stay with the firm for a while as she recall. A&K had a supportive culture that began from top leadership.
With 16 years’ experience as a CFO and COO of A&K Advocates, she advises the CFOs both young, upcoming, and experienced to not restrict themselves to financial reporting and the numbers, as they need to see themselves as partners to the CEOs in running the business through implementing strategy and growth.
Shital Shah adds that CFOs need to have a very good understanding of the business and contribute ideas on how the company can exploit opportunities. She emphasizes adaptability and recommends the book “Designing Your Life” which helped shape her personal and professional life. Young professionals should not be afraid to try different areas even if they end up making mistakes as they’ll not repeat them in future.
How does Churpy help CFOs go beyond numbers?
A proactive approach to risk management has become a crucial part of a CFO’s role hence Churpy follows and complies with best practices such as data protection. This instills confidence in our clients’ attitude towards us.
An adept CFO can significantly influence how the market perceives the company, impacting its valuation and access to capital. Churpy makes this possible through partnerships with our bank partners to ensure we optimize working capital finance e.g. for the supply chain.
We also help CFOs track account balances in real-time and generate debtors’ insight and credit analytics through self-service dashboards that help them gain single-view insights and hence tackle the challenge of looking at such data in an innovative way.
To achieve all these with us, please reach out to us at sales@churpy.co .