Four things your Finance team should stop to help the business more
By Andy Burrows
Iāve worked as a senior leader in many Finance teams. And over the years Iāve noticed several things that we do that really hamper our effectiveness.
āEffectivenessā can be defined as the extent to which weāre achieving our mission.
Iāll come to that mission more specifically at the end of this article. But for now, letās just take it in general terms that we exist in the business to help the business. We donāt do anything for its own sake, just to satisfy ourselves as accountants. We donāt produce reports just to be able to admire a nice report. We donāt do analysis just so that we can admire a financial model that balances. All the things we do should help the business.
And so, I want to talk about things Iāve come to see as unhelpful. Some of them we take for granted. We just do them, we accept that they exist and we perpetuate them. Some of them almost have the status of sacred cows that we donāt feel able to question.
I hope that in the process of highlighting...
Business Performance Reporting - It's Not All About the P&L!
By Andy Burrows [originally published September 2016]
If you are going to be successful in managing your business, you need measurement. You need facts that tell you how well you are doing and where you need to improve.
And those measures of success are much broader than just financial measures, such as profit, cash, margins, etc, however important they are.
How do you make sure that your business is heading in the right direction? How do you make sure that your strategies are working? How can you even tell if your strategies are being implemented correctly?
Is profit the only measure of success? Does profit tell you anything about whether you are achieving your vision?
Letās say my vision was to become number 1 in a particular market. How would I know how close I was to achieving that? Not by looking at my profit in isolation.
And just asking that question leads to other useful questions that clarify what I am aiming at. For instance, what does becoming number 1 mean? Number 1 f...
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