Is your finance team providing valuable insight for your business?

Co-authored by Rodger Howell and Don Rupprecht

Up until now, the primary focus of the efficiency agenda has been rationalizing, standardizing and automating routine processes. Along with lower cost and faster turnaround, one of the big benefits has been freeing up finance professionals to devote more time to business analysis, insight and advice.

Boards want timely, reliable, predictive analysis to help them steer through an increasingly complex and uncertain commercial landscape. Too slow, and the information is already out of date. Too vague, and they won’t be able to move forward with confidence.

 The true test is whether you’re a trusted advisor for the board and whether your insights are delivering bottom line benefits.  For many finance teams that means asking the questions: ‘how can I streamline all those spreadsheets into a swift and reliable turnaround?’ ‘How can I make the most of the latest analytics to develop a clear understanding of strategic opportunities and threats?’ ‘How can I convey the information in the most accessible and useable way?’

This underlines the value of a direct reporting line into the business, along with profit-focused KPIs to support it.  

Centralize or decentralize
Some businesses have centralized their analytics into dedicated centers of excellence in a bid to increase capacity, speed up delivery and allow business partners to concentrate on insights rather than number crunching.

While there are merits to a centralized approach, it’s not the only way. It’s important to think about how it would work in your particular organization. Unlike process efficiency, in which cost reduction provides a reasonably good measure of return on investment (ROI), it’s harder to develop a reliable performance indicator for higher value-adding analytical input. As with any satellite operation, there’s also a risk that local teams will bypass it and do their own thing.

People make the difference
Indeed, in seeking to maximize the return on analytics, the biggest differentiator is the quality of your business-facing insight teams. They clearly need to be tech-savvy to make the most of the latest analytics, though this also depends on the quality and consistency of the data coming in from the business. Equally, if not more important, is a clear understanding of your business and its markets. And the key to achieving this is careful management of career development within your insight teams. Interestingly, this is the area that the companies taking part in our finance benchmark analysis find most challenging. Effective use of job rotation provides a valuable way to give finance professionals experience within the business and bring people from the business into finance.

Marking out the front-runners
As our benchmark evaluation highlights, what this all comes down to is three key attributes for finance  efficiency:

1/ Data consistency
Developing the standardization of data, streamlined lines of reporting and underlying business buy-in needed to ensure timely, reliable and consistent data.

2/ Organizational clarity
Analytics doesn’t necessarily need to be centralized into a center of excellence. But it’s still important to have clear allocation of responsibilities to ensure the most effective use of business partner time.

3/ Strong talent pipeline
Identifying people with the right skills and enabling them to gain varied and extensive experience within the business.

So how do you know that you’re getting the right ROI with your analytics? The true test is whether you’re a trusted advisor for the board and whether your insights are delivering bottom line benefits. This underlines the value of a direct reporting line into the business, along with profit-focused KPIs to support this.  

Is your finance team efficient enough to provide genuinely valuable insights for your business?