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Balancing the Books and the Emotions: Empowering Your Finance Team for Good
The finance team has a big responsibility in an IT Services company:
- Ensuring a smooth flow of revenue
- Maintaining accurate fiscal reporting
- Safeguarding compliance with financial regulations
The problem is that most of the time, this team has to contend with tons of frustrating challenges that lead to inefficiency, mistakes, and emotional and physical burnout.
As the CRO, this is something you’re probably already aware of. Your team may have experienced it. But maybe you’re unsure about how to solve the problem.
That’s why we’ve written an article to dive into these problems and give you an actionable roadmap to get your team out, and back to where they should be.
Which Problems Cause a Finance Team the Most Frustration
The finance team has to fend off challenges each day. Fighting constant battles with little or no real help or solutions can take a real toll on both the team’s performance and them as individuals. Here are some of the biggest offenders:
Too much manual entry work: It is soul-sapping, boring, and monotonous. It is also a major waste of time. The finance team will spend countless hours inputting data, changing data, fixing data errors, and reconciling everything. When work is mundane, you get frustration and a drop in productivity.
Delays in reporting and closing fiscal periods: Both of these are time-sensitive tasks. But these important activities are often delayed because of mistakes, inconsistencies, understaffing, scaling, or the sheer pile of work that needs to be done. Next thing you know, it disrupts financial planning and decision-making processes throughout the business.
Invoice mistakes: Though accurate invoicing is essential to a company’s success, mistakes are common. And they are deadly for a company’s financial health. The finance team must scramble to juggle credits, disputes, and strained client relationships. They also have to give up a huge chunk of their time to it. It’s the last thing they need.
Revenue in limbo: Delayed contracts, unfulfilled obligations, and unresolved disputes can prevent complete revenue recognition, throwing uncertainty over you and the team. When revenue is in limbo, the finance team has to untie the backlog and improve cash flow management and financial planning.
Incomplete revenue recognition: Incomplete or inaccurate revenue recognition can distort the company’s financial picture. This distortion can complicate decision-making and strategic planning, adding extra pressure on the finance team to ensure accuracy in revenue reporting.
Delayed customer onboarding: Onboarding can be an intensive process. But it can drag to slow and cumbersome The process of onboarding new customers is often slow and cumbersome. When you add poor communication and a lack of information between teams, delays can postpone revenue generation and hurt customer relationships.
Delayed payments: Late payments from customers require constant chasing from the team, and they disrupt the company’s cash flow. This makes it further difficult for the finance team to meet their own obligations and pay invoices to suppliers. It also makes it hard to plan for the future.
All these issues can make the team’s life extremely difficult from the time they start work in the morning till the end of the day.
The Impact of These Problems
These frustrations within the finance team can have a profound impact on both the team itself and the company as a whole.
It impacts you as the CRO. You have to account for inaccurate financial forecasting, strained relationships with other departments due to delayed reporting, and a constant state of damage control.
This situation spells stress for everyone involved. It crushes your team’s morale. It impacts your ability to focus on strategy and the future.
And the company must tackle inefficient operations, employee turnover, and bad customer relationships thanks to delays and dispute resolution.
In other words, no one’s happy.
5 Actions to Empower Your Finance Team
The great news is that there are things you can do as the CRO to turn things around for your team (and everyone else!). Here are some of the actionable steps:
1. Streamline All Your Revenue Processes
It’s important to lay a good foundation for success by simplifying everything as much as possible. That means standardising financial processes so that the team feels as supported as possible. They need their jobs to be as easy as possible so that takes are more manageable for the team.
2. Give Your Teams All The Training They Need
When you give your team regular training sessions, you ensure that they know what they are doing and how to avoid expensive and demoralising mistakes. They work faster, with fewer mistakes and feel better about their impact on the company and customers.
3. Open Up Communication
Silos can kill a team’s impact. That’s why it’s key to take steps to open up the flow of 24-7 communication between teams. That doesn’t mean that your teams have to be on the phone or emailing each other every hour on the day. But it does mean accurate information sharing that’s accessible to who needs it. And perhaps periodical meetings between teams too. Poen and clear communication improves collaboration and efficiency and cuts down on misunderstandings and mistakes.
4. Adopt Robust Reviews
Quality control is important because it can help catch mistakes early so they can be stopped before snowballing into serious problems. Checks and balances in your financial processes take a lot of pressure off everyone because the system gets proactive instead of reactive when it’s too late.
5. Bring In Automation For Your Team and Processes
This is the action that can transform the situation most because it relieves your team of the burdens of what causes the team trouble in the first place.
Automation takes care of the actions above for you. It-
- drastically reduces manual data entry
- streamlines and simplifies processes
- enables accurate and fast reporting
- ensures onboarding meets deadlines
- reduces the need for extensive training
- enables real-time communication between teams
- constantly ensures accuracy
- minimizes invoice errors
- expedites customer onboarding
- ensures timely revenue recognition and payments
- enables growth and scaling without complications
Giving your team, your company, and yourself automation clears all the boring, mundane, awful, crushing work out of the way so that everyone can concentrate on doing the work that honors their talents and goals.
And that’s what a successful company is really all about! It Can All be Yours
As the CRO, you do have to deal with a lot of obstacles. But one of the most difficult obstacles is a stressed-out, burned-out finance team.
But when you understand the underlying causes, it’s a lot easier to take proactive measures to solve the problem.
You can have a happier and more efficient finance team and better performance for both you and the company.
It’s all about taking action- or letting automation take the action for you.
Either way, you win. When you were brought on as CFO, no doubt you had a very clear idea of how you wanted to move the company forward.
But you know that when you’re too busy chasing small payments, you won’t have the time to do the things you want and need to do.
However, taking proactive steps to get to the root of this problem will empower both you and your finance team to improve efficiency and enhance the financial stability and growth of your company.
Why not start that dedicated move to financial excellence now?
Let’s chat further.
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