A recent survey by accounting software provider Blackline revealed that one third of UK business decision-makers at medium to large sized enterprises believe their finance teams are an under-utilised resource. Could your finance team be making more of an impact than it currently is? Find out what you could task your CFO and their team with to grow your organisation, below.
Is your finance team working in the right areas?
For many organisations, finance professionals “are overworked in some areas they maybe don’t need to be working in, and not involved in other areas where maybe they could be,” according to Elisabeth Saunders, ACMA, CGMA, a finance manager who leads a team at Sussex Oakleaf, a healthcare not-for-profit.
The fact is, in smaller finance teams, the focus tends to be on the transactional side - the every day running of the business. But what about on the business development side of finance? Could your finance team play a part in identifying areas of growth for your business?
This is possible according to Joshua Azran, CPA/ABV/CFF, CGMA, founder of Azran Financial APC. “The finance team is the scorekeeper but also an allocator of resources in a business. They can actually drive value.”
As experts at interpreting data, finance teams are well place to help upper management identifyand derive trends from various data points about the health of an organisation. For example, they have access to the data that can identify the most profitable areas of the business, where cost savings can be made, and where investment should be prioritised.
CFOs can be agents of change
As a result to the key business data they have access to, Chief Finance Officers and their teams are in an ideal position to steer organisations through change. One example is business technology.
“It is critical that CFOs collaborate with HR and IT,” according to Carol Sawdye, CPA, the CFO of PwC US. “The CFO needs to play a proactive role to push forward the business model and technology changes that are going to be required to increase operational effectiveness. CFOs need to push their C-suite colleagues by helping them see the financial impact of acceleratingtechnology trends.”
Technological improvements in business tools such as software can have a dramatic effect on a firm’s profitability. Embracing software packages such as marketing automation, Enterprise Resource Planning applications, and modern sales tools like Customer Relationship Manager packages can dramatically improve the effectiveness of employees across many departments.
It is essential for finance teams to understand these changes, what impact they could have on the business, and where investment should be made. The finance department holds the purse strings, so it’s essential they are clear on what technologies can improve their businesses and able to lead it’s adoption.
Arbiters of big data
Big data raises challenging questions about the future role of finance. It’s all to easy for accountants to be sidelined as being simply the people who specialise in providing financial accounts and reporting past performance.
The flip side is, finance teams could seize the opportunity to become champions of big data as a source of evidence to support effective decision making. This could create a fundamental shift in how business is done. Finance professionals already know how to work with data, they know how the business operates, so they have a real opportunity to contribute to the growth of your organisation.
In order to do so, finance teams must begin to look beyond traditional business metrics and recognise the commercial potential of embracing a wider set of data. What other areas do they need to look at in order to gain a more thorough understanding of business performance? These could be data sources that finance professionals don’t traditionally look at, yet access to such information could allow them to make enormous contributions to your firm.
Involvement from the finance team also adds credibility to growth plans and new business ventures, since finance professionals are often among the most conservative when it comes to recommending new investment.
Could your finance team become a more proactive business partner to the rest of your business?
