Four things your Finance team should stop to help the business more

By Andy Burrows

I’ve worked as a senior leader in many Finance teams. And over the years I’ve noticed several things that we do that really hamper our effectiveness.

‘Effectiveness’ can be defined as the extent to which we’re achieving our mission.

I’ll come to that mission more specifically at the end of this article. But for now, let’s just take it in general terms that we exist in the business to help the business. We don’t do anything for its own sake, just to satisfy ourselves as accountants. We don’t produce reports just to be able to admire a nice report. We don’t 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 I’ve 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...

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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?

Let’s 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...

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