Finance has had a rough ride through the downturn and is now picking itself up and forging forward with longer term plans to transform the function. However, knowing what you have to do to get to where you want to depends on where you stand today.

Before embarking on change strategies it is important to baseline where you are so you can measure progress towards your goals and justify spend. Benchmarking is an effective way of helping create that solid basis for change. In addition, if you want your finance function to be best in class then you need to know how it compares, and that means being able to measure it against others.

The PwC Finance Benchmark helps in three important ways:

• It provides a baseline against which to measure progress
• It compares your internal businesses/divisions
• It compares you to your peers and tells you what the most successful finance functions are doing in organisations like yours

Why PwC?

• Our benchmarking tool has practicality at its heart – the number of measures is based on strategic relevance and getting the balance right between insight and practicality
• There is value-add to the data by including industry experts to bring ‘real world’ context to build a practical, achievable roadmap
• The dataset is more up-to-date than any other provider and is refreshed annually 
• We use a single, simple framework to help clients through a journey of continuous improvement; from initial benchmark, to strategy based around the features of high performing finance functions, through to implementation.