Thanks to the recession, CFOs have been asked to provide their corporate boards with more and better information. Apparently, such demands have triggered CFOs’ penchant for rigorous self-appraisal — perhaps unnecessarily so. In a recent survey of board members and senior finance executives conducted by CFO Research Services on behalf of accounting and consulting firm Crowe Horwath, board members consistently awarded higher scores to finance than finance awarded itself. From the quantity of information to the analysis that accompanies it, and across a broad spectrum of criteria that describe the board-finance relationship and the finance function’s ability to meet board members’ needs, finance graded its own performance with a more critical eye than did board members.

Buck up, finance: you are, in fact, performing quite well.