How well does your recruitment firm utilise the wealth of financial and customer data you process on a daily basis? How easy is it for your staff to collate and store that data? And can they subsequently find what they need quickly and use it for decision-making and reporting? In reality, a large proportion of businesses could do far more with their data. It’s common for key information to be dormant in spreadsheets or files rather than readily available – and that could be holding your business back.
- Topic:
- Finance
Ensuring finance departments are being utilised to the best of their ability and using the most up-to-date systems is key for good financial management.
Best practices in 2022 might look a little different for finance teams even to just a couple of years ago. According to Accenture in February 2021, 79% of CFOS surveyed said that the effects of Covid-19 have compelled them to ramp up their finance transformation efforts.
So it's clear the effects of the pandemic has led to finance teams reflecting on what good practice looks like and considering what changes need to be made.
In this blog, we discuss the best practices a top finance team should follow, what makes a good finance team and why switching your accounting software could empower a finance team to make a real contribution to overall business goals.
- Topic:
- Finance
Are you a Finance Director in a recruitment firm who has seen debtor days rising? Are you concerned that the risk of bad debt might be heading in the wrong direction? It’s not surprising or unusual in the current economic climate as many businesses are operating with cashflow issues and disruption stemming from the pandemic, Brexit, as well as the war in some cases too. So it is entirely possible that a proportion of your customers are struggling. If the risk of bad debt is concerning you and your senior management team, read on for a solution.
- Topic:
- Finance
The future of finance will see technology continue to improve and support professionals working in the sector. Their experience and knowledge, paired with a wealth of data from all corners of a business and processed by ever-evolving financial management software, will enable better decision making and, ultimately, stronger business performance.
- Topic:
- Finance
Agility is the watchword for the best performing recruitment agencies right now – not least because we’ve seen the most turbulent two years of business activity in a lifetime. But how quickly and confidently has your recruitment firm responded to constant change so far?
Have your business leaders felt confident with their decision-making – or felt concern about what the impact might be? And ultimately, has Finance led the charge or held things back?
- Topic:
- Finance
Every recruitment agency Finance Director knows that their team of consultants are the firm’s most expensive and most valuable asset. So that means it’s all the more important to ensure that your company is doing everything it can to keep them happy, motivated and productive – and therefore more likely to stay loyal in the long term. But even recruitment firms are not immune to the Great Resignation as recently reported.
The best performing consultants present the highest risk for your agency if they jump ship – not least because their excellent contacts and high productivity rates would be lost overnight. It also takes a while and can be costly to replace your staff, all whilst work is not being done and revenue not generated as a result of their absence.
Clearly there will be some factors that recruitment HR leaders and managers can address. But there are also actions that the recruitment agency Finance Director and senior leadership team can embrace in order to protect the business and its top performers.
- Topic:
- Finance
The recruitment sector always struggles to operate at full capacity when faced with a shortage of labour, and unfortunately, headlines about the nationwide labour shortage dominated for a large part of 2021. From hospitality to logistics, construction to agriculture, industry and sector leaders are voicing concern that difficulties with finding and keeping staff will continue well into 2022.
In the last year we have seen record highs in job vacancies and according to the REC, nine in ten recruiters (88%) say that labour shortages are their biggest concern; skill shortages are also a major concern for two in three (65%). And sectors which have typically relied on workers from the EU in larger volumes – agriculture is a prime example – have struggled significantly.
- Topic:
- Finance
For almost two years, the pandemic has driven change in business.
According to the ACCA*, in our latest podcast on Next Generation Finance, many leaders are pushing for businesses to ‘get back to normal’, with a desire to revert back to how things were pre-pandemic.
In fact, a mere 36% of business leaders felt the changes they’d put in place during the pandemic were for the long-term.
Not being open to change and exploring new ways of working could have a major impact on teams, especially those who rely on consistency – like accounting professionals working within finance departments.
While change can be a scary prospect, we’re working to shatter the myths and encourage finance leaders to embrace change.
- Topic:
- Finance
According to the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), there are several misconceptions about the role of an accountant in the 21st Century.
The most predominant one, is that robots – rather ‘Robotic Process Automation’ (RPA) - will take the jobs of existing and budding accountants, and that the demand for them and their technical accounting skills, because of this, are diminishing.
In reality, it is far from the truth. Here’s a snapshot of why we should be paying attention to RPA:
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has gained momentum during the pandemic as a reliable means of reducing manual accounting processes.
- A recent study shows that RPA has decreased costs for onshore process operations by 65%.
- RPA has also been shown to increase employee engagement by 73%
- According to a PwC report, finance teams could benefit from adopting more digital technologies to support future accountants.
In this blog, we demystify some of those blurred perceptions of accounting automation, and explain how businesses can really reap the long-term rewards to retain and attract the finance professionals of the future.
- Topic:
- Finance
Trends in business affect all industries and professions. Some are fast-flowing, some are more of a steady evolution. Accounting may have traditionally been one of the latter but, thanks to technology, it is changing rapidly with new methods and tricks to make businesses more competitive.
2022 and beyond will be a chance for accountants to see further change and move the profession forward as the world nervously wakes up from the Covid pandemic. The opportunities that change can bring are well worth embracing.
Here, we explore some of the future trends in the accounting profession that you should look out for in 2022.
- Topic:
- Finance
