Finance

Chief Financial Officers and their staffs are facing multiple challenges. Finance budgets have declined from 2.20% of revenue in 1998 to just 1.06% in 2002. Finance departments are expected to be the objective collector and purveyor of information to be used by the management team to make better decisions. At the same time the recent scandals in the USA have created a greater demand for accuracy than ever before.

A Chief Financial Officer not only is responsible for establishing the culture and business processes for the finance group, but also managing the following:

• Accounting - Accounting transaction processing, including financial control and reporting while maintaining a consistent, reconciled, and auditable set of books for statutory and management reporting.
• Strategic Enterprise Management - including Shareholder relationship management, strategy management, performance management, strategy planning and simulation, planning, reporting, analysis, and response to business change. Bridging the world of financial data (which indicates past performance) and operational data (which projects future financial results), and translating business strategy and transforming business data into real-time insight
• Business Analytics -includes financial analytics, customer relationship analytics, supply chain analytics, human resources analytics and a wide range product lifecycle, and e-commerce/marketplace management.
• Financial Supply Chain Management - including purchase-to-pay and order-to-cash payment and billing cycles. Overseeing financial supply chain management capabilities, reducing working capital needs, improving billing and payment processes, and more accurately forecasting cash positions.
• Corporate Services - includes travel management, real estate management, treasury management, and incentives and commissions management, streamlining business processes and reducing the costs of core business operations. The savings these solutions deliver often make a significant difference to the bottom line.
• Financial and Management Portals -creating and delivering customized, personally relevant information to decision-making individuals throughout the enterprise. Creating financial portals that enable executives and directors to view business data in real time to solutions that increase the productivity of middle managers.
  

The person best suited to advise, consult and coach on these and a myriad of other topics are former CFO’s. We match our CFO consultants with you based on the experience and knowledge that is best suited to your needs. The following are examples of the projects our executive consultants have worked on with clients:

• Acquisitions and divestitures,
• Designed planning and reporting processes,
• Assessed business values,
• Assisted with turning around under performing business units,
• Optimized cash flow,
• Assisted with establishing a shared services center,
• Evaluated outsourcing options,
• Performed Economic Value Added analysis of business units,
• Built business plans for start up companies,
• Calculated direct and variable ROI,
• Did activity based costing,
• Determined cost of capital/DCF valuations,
• Assisted with corporate strategic planning and optimized business processes within finance.
  

Tell us what challenges you face and how we can help you achieve your goals.