How do you elevate the role of the Finance Team within Your Organisation?
With a shift to more data-driven decision-making, the role of the finance department needs to be elevated from a back office operational function to a more strategic, advisory role. Finance teams must become more agile and responsive to organisational needs in this new role. They must shift their time away from tedious manual processes and spend more delivering value-added analysis, identifying trends and using analytics to guide business decisions that impact profitability.
Our vision of a best practice Finance Team sees the adoption of a Financial Performance Management (“FPM”) strategy, working alongside the traditional financial processes needed to run the business, as a stepping stone to success.
The HAYNE FPM Strategy concentrates on the relationship between three distinct, but related, financial processes.
Close and Consolidate (CC)
The CC process is perhaps the most fundamental and essential of finance duties. However, it involves a set of tasks that has historically been burdened by slow, manual, spreadsheet-based procedures.
For a leading organisation, the entire CC process should be automated, from data collection to financial consolidation. Data is brought together from diverse entities and divisions into a single view with automated intercompany and investment elimination and currency translation). The result is a shorter, more controlled close cycle, with increased visibility and accountability and the assured data integrity needed for compliance. There is also flexibility to easily deal with changes to accounting and company structures required by management and through acquisition and disposal.
Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting (BP&F)
The BP&F process has historically been one of the most time-consuming and tedious tasks for an organisation to an extent that, instead of being a rolling event, it is often reduced to a centralised annual task. This is often due to the fact that delivery of this process is through spreadsheets.
Our vision of BP&F enables ‘best practice’ high participation, high-frequency plan revision and creates the capability for an on-going cycle of planning and forecasting, analysing, evaluating and action. The organisation can then adapt quickly to changing conditions, instead of working to the limitations of a rigid annual budget. In addition, FPM capabilities such as scenario modelling and sensitivity analysis allow finance to help senior management anticipate and prepare for what’s ahead.
Analyse, evaluate, report, disclose and action
The process of analysing information, adding commentary, formatting, compiling and distributing information is often still very labour intensive. There is little time available to perform insightful analysis of information.
A Finance Team are able to elevate themselves to the ‘strategic’ level by automating manual tasks around compilation and distribution and spending more time analysing data from a consistent data source, adding insightful commentary and helping business managers drive profitability and growth initiatives.
What next
If you want to discuss how we can help you to elevate the role of the Finance Team contact us