Philippines: CloudCFO

CloudCFO – Innovative Accounting and Financial Services provider in Philippines

Overview

CloudCfo (or the “Company”) is an innovative and progressive Filipino firm providing bespoke accounting, bookkeeping and tax compliance services through the utilization and enablement of cloud and smart technology. The founders, Mickael Cardoso Das Neves and his wife, Anne Gauthier, established CloudCfo in 2016 in response to the rising demand for reliable and affordable accounting and financial services, particularly by small and medium enterprises (“SME”) in the Philippines.

SMEs comprise 99.6% of all registered businesses in the Philippines and employ over 70% of the working population. Though SMEs consistently make positive contributions to the economy in the Philippines, the rate of failure is also high. Lack of effective financial management during SMEs’ early stages is a major cause of business failure for small businesses, partly due to the inability of financial managers to plan and control their finances properly.

CloudCfo assists SMEs and startups to navigate their businesses through an integrated suite of services delivered and enabled by cloud technology. These services expertly combine streamlined business processes while maintaining control and governance with comprehensive role-based security and management tools. The services include:

• Accounting and Bookkeeping: Ensuring that a client’s finance functions generate clean, accurate and timely financial information and reports
• Tax compliance: Advising companies on all aspects of their tax compliance requirements in order to achieve full and timely compliance
• Financial reporting: Generating financial reports that provide clear and accurate information detailing the status of clients’ finances to help them make decisions
• Payroll: Providing services such as onboarding new employees, salary computations, application of all statutory benefits and processing of expense reimbursements
• Budgeting and financial forecasts: Helping clients to develop periodic financial budgets with the identification of key drivers of income, direct expenses and overhead expenses, projections for profit margins, advice on areas for greater cost efficiencies
• Virtual CFO services: This offering enables clients to engage the expertise, skill and professionalism of a Chief Financial Officer without having to invest in recruitment, training or equivalent Full-Time Employee compensation.

CloudCfo recognizes the challenges SMEs face in growing their businesses and takes an active responsibility in the financial processes of its customers. Its services are very competitively priced, particularly when taking into consideration the quality of services offered against the cost of building an in-house accounting resource or team. For more details on CloudCfo, please access the website https://cloudcfo.ph/.

Key Facts

Current Activities

• CloudCfo works with approximately 21 women-led and/or women-owned companies and plans to increase this number by reaching out to women-focused associations in the country.
• CloudCfo is a learning organization that embraces a culture of lifelong learning, enabling all employees to continually acquire and share knowledge. It promotes not just employee’s growth within the company but also their individual career growth. CloudCfo believes that employees who are engaged in their work and committed to the Company give it a competitive advantage, including higher productivity, better customer service, and lower turnover.
• There are two types of training that CloudCfo is focusing on:
• Technical training – Referred to as ‘hard skills’, this training involves skills that are job-specific such as up-to-date technology expertise, taxation and bookkeeping refresher, etc.
• Soft-skill training – As CloudCfo provides accounting services to different clients, the Company believes technical skills alone are not enough for an employee to become a truly effective finance and accounting professional. Employees also need to develop soft skills which include effective communication, knowledge sharing / public speaking, ethics & fraud, decision techniques, problem solving and creative visualization.
• CloudCfo aims to provide at least one company-wide training per calendar year, and at least one technical and one soft-skill training per calendar year.
• CloudCfo will establish an Employee Stock Option Plan (“ESOP”) as an incentive to qualified employees to help in growing the business and improving its profitability.

CloudCFO’s SEAF Gender Equality Score©

Philippine’s Gender Demographics

• According to the 2018 Global Gender Gap report, the Philippines ranks 8th in the world closing just under 80% of its overall gender gap, the highest value for the country ever recorded by the Index.
• However, the labor force participation of women in the Philippines reached a new all-time low in 2018, dropping to 46% —the lowest in South East Asia—from 49% – 50% in the past years. Such a low rate could eventually hurt economic development and hold back the progress of women’s rights in the Philippines.
• A 2018 Survey of Entrepreneurs and MSMEs in the Philippines found that women are more than twice as likely to lack access to any support services (39%) or be uninterested in accessing support services (36%) than men. These include research support, technology training, mentorship programs and networking, international experiences, and financial support services – all of which are vital to improving survival probabilities of SMEs

Women Economic Empowerment Highlights

Pay Equity

• No major pay discrimination across different employee categories with a compensation ratio of the women to men being at least 90%
• SEAF’s WEE Team is working with the Company on establishing employee surveys or benchmarking studies, with disaggregated data to further improve pay equity and other non-monetary compensation
• Exit interviews need to be included in discussions on pay equity

Benefits & Professional Development

• CloudCfo provides technical and soft skills training on an annual basis. Technical training is also required for the continuing education requirements of the professional board
• SEAF WEE Team will review the performance evaluation process to incorporate the proposed mentorship program

Workforce Participation

• 65% of all employees are women
• Work-from-home arrangements and flexible office hours were implemented to navigate the heavy traffic in Metro Manila. This was instituted even before the COVID-19 pandemic

Workplace Environment

• The office is intentionally located in a centrally located area to provide easy accessibility to its employees, particularly its women employees
• Though work environment policies are in place, the Company needs to regularly communicate these policies to their employees

Leadership & Governance

• Women figure prominently in the management of the Company leading operations, product development and services
• An informal mentorship has been in place but the Company together with the SEAF WEE Team will institute a formalized mentorship program with the aim of developing its employees to enable them to rise through the ranks to become managers and business leaders

Women Powered Value Chains

• CloudCfo has been focusing on reaching women-led and women-owned enterprises, a sector that has been underserved. The Company understands the challenges they face in managing their businesses and have structured its services accordingly