Supply chain visibility impacts cost, risk, and resilience. See why CFOs are prioritising it and how finance teams benefit from real-time data.
Supply chain visibility has shifted from being a back-office concern to a boardroom priority. Global disruptions, rising costs, and increasing regulation have made it clear that gaps in visibility directly affect your organisation’s financial performance.
If you’re leading finance in a logistics business, you’re expected to deliver stability, manage risk, and optimise working capital. None of that is possible if you don’t have a clear, real-time view of what’s happening across your supply chain.
The Financial Impact of Poor Visibility
When supply chain data is incomplete or outdated, the impact reaches far beyond operations. It limits your ability to control costs, protect margins, and plan effectively. Finance leaders end up reacting to problems instead of preventing them.
When your team relies on spreadsheets or disconnected systems, reporting becomes slow and reactive. By the time you’ve pulled together the numbers, the decision you needed to make may already be out of date. That lack of timeliness can cost opportunities and weaken your ability to respond to disruption.
Research from McKinsey estimates that fragmented data and silos cost businesses up to $3.1 trillion annually in lost productivity and revenue opportunities. For logistics businesses, the impact often shows up in duplicate freight charges, excess storage fees, or inaccurate billing. These inefficiencies quietly drain profitability over time.
Blind spots in your supply chain introduce direct risk to your bottom line. Without full visibility, you face higher chances of stockouts, missed deliveries, and costly expedited shipments. Each of these scenarios creates unplanned costs that erode margins and make it harder to forecast with confidence.
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Why Visibility Has Become a Top CFO Priority
You’re facing constant pressure from disruption, rising costs, and stricter compliance demands. Gaining clear visibility into suppliers, shipments, inventory, and costs gives you the control you need to respond quickly, protect margins, and build resilience into your operations.
Supply chain disruption at the top of the agenda
Geopolitical tensions, weather events, and port congestion continue to expose weak spots. Without timely data, shocks turn into missed orders, higher premiums, and emergency spend that you can’t always recover. Visibility means you can identify risks early and take action before they escalate into major setbacks.
Growing pressure on cost control
Protecting margins depends on knowing exactly where money leaks. Transparent views of freight, surcharges, storage, and write-offs help you find savings and prove where efficiencies can be made. With the right visibility, you can also challenge suppliers and partners on costs that don’t align with agreed terms.
Demand for real-time information
You don’t have the luxury of waiting for month-end reports. Live dashboards and alerts let you adjust pricing, contracts, and capacity before issues escalate and hit your bottom line. This level of immediacy gives you the confidence to make bold decisions without waiting for historical data to confirm the trend.
Visibility as a resilience tool
Clear data allows you to plan for scenarios and act early. By modelling risks and setting thresholds, you can keep service levels steady and cash flow predictable even when disruption strikes. Stronger resilience also reassures stakeholders that the business can withstand external shocks and still deliver.
What True Visibility Looks Like
Supply chain visibility goes far beyond tracking shipments. It gives you and your team the confidence that every financial and operational decision is based on accurate, up-to-date information. True visibility combines scope, speed, and integration.
You need a clear view across suppliers, warehouses, freight, and customer deliveries. This end-to-end coverage makes it possible to see where delays, cost overruns, or inefficiencies are building up and take corrective action quickly.
Monthly or even weekly reporting doesn’t give you the agility you need. Real-time updates let you monitor costs and performance as they happen, so you can adjust immediately rather than reacting after the fact.
Disconnected systems create blind spots. Linking financial data with logistics platforms such as transport and warehouse management systems, or tools like e2open, ensures you see the complete picture. Integration removes duplication, reduces errors, and creates a single source of truth for your team.
How Finance Leaders Benefit from Visibility
When you can see the whole picture in real time, you gain practical control over cost, risk and cash. Here’s how visibility improves day-to-day decisions and long-term planning.
Stronger risk management
You spot supplier delays or cost spikes early. Early signals let you adjust contracts, reroute shipments or switch suppliers before costs snowball.
Tighter cost control
Line-item views of freight surcharges, demurrage and storage make waste easy to see. You can challenge discrepancies and track savings to the P&L.
Better working capital management
Accurate demand and inventory data help you set stock targets with confidence. Less cash gets trapped in excess stock and write-offs fall.
Faster, smarter decisions
Live dashboards and alerts support same-day actions. You act on current figures rather than last month’s reports.
See how finance teams gain control with Sage Intacct
The Role of Sage Intacct
If visibility is the goal, your finance platform will need to produce reliable, up-to-date numbers without manual effort. Sage Intacct will provide that foundation so you can act with confidence. You can reach that point without heavy IT lift or disruptive change.
Here’s how:
Close and consolidate faster
Multi-entity consolidation, currency handling and intercompany eliminations will run in the system. You’ll shorten the close, surface issues earlier and redirect time to analysis. Month end will be calmer because fewer adjustments will appear late.
See performance by what matters
Dimensions will let you analyse results by supplier, route, carrier, warehouse and customer without rebuilding reports. You’ll filter, drill and compare budget versus actuals in minutes. Priorities will be clearer, so effort lands where returns are highest.
Bring operations into the accounts
Native APIs will connect finance to transport and warehouse systems, including platforms like e2open. Shipment events, landed costs, and billable services will post straight into AP or AR and to the right project or item. Fewer re-keys will mean fewer errors and quicker billing, which improves cash collection.
Strengthen controls and compliance
Workflows, approvals and audit trails will enforce policy and reduce errors. You’ll have clear evidence for statutory and ESG reporting with fewer audit surprises. Stakeholders will stay confident because figures will reconcile and processes will be visible.
Conclusion
You’ve seen why visibility matters to your role: incomplete data slows decisions, leaks revenue and raises risk. You’ve also seen why it’s now a top CFO priority, what true visibility looks like across scope, speed and integration, and how it translates into stronger risk control, tighter costs, better working capital and faster decisions. The final piece is the platform that will make this operational every day.
You need reliable, live numbers to control cost, risk and cash. Supply chain visibility gives you that foundation, and Sage Intacct turns it into a day-to-day practice through real-time reporting, dimensions and integrated workflows. The result is faster closes, clearer priorities and fewer surprises.
If you’d like to see how this would work with your figures, book a short Discovery Call. We’ll map your current processes, show the visibility gains you can expect and outline a practical path to get there.
Book your free Discovery Call here