What could your finance team do if given five hours back a week?
For finance professionals working in a professional services business, time is often the biggest restraint that stops them from focussing on value added-responsibilities, such as analysing financial data to provide more realistic, more accurate forecasts of how projects impact the business. Or spending time developing key financial policies that can influence other teams across the business to be more cash conscious, which could help to reduce ongoing project costs.
But the time is there, it's just how finance teams use it. One survey revealed that most finance professionals spend almost one day a week on general admin tasks. That same survey found that 65 per cent of respondents think there is a clear disconnect between what they spend their time doing and what they should actually be focusing on. Like those value-added tasks mentioned above that can really help drive growth across a business.
General admin can be exacerbated by outdated or disconnected accounting systems. Most financial professionals who work in businesses that have grown through mergers and acquisitions for example, will be familiar with working with different and often unharmonious systems. When businesses are brought together, it’s extremely unlikely they will have the same or even similar finance and accounting software, or wider business management tools.
Software that isn’t designed to communicate with each other often creates barriers and ‘silos’ that over the course of weeks and months clocks up hours of time that simply stops finance teams from performing their role efficiently and effectively.
If a finance professional can shed even just five hours a week of time spent on general admin or because of fragmented processes, that’s hours of extra time they can spend on strategy and influencing decision makers across the business each month. Investing in a central finance management system is one way to help your finance team get those valuable hours back.
Hours down to minutes
Brown & Co is a leading provider of agency, professional and consultancy services across the range of rural, commercial and residential property, as well as agriculture and the environment.
Growth driven by mergers and acquisitions meant that the company had numerous systems and processes, as well as 34 income streams – which meant the accountancy team had to run 34 separate reports each month and manually collate them on a master spreadsheet. Something which took them hours to do.
The business decided to invest in The Access Group’s financial management system to be able to perform the task in a matter of seconds, as Brown & Co’s Commercial Operations Director Alton Nutile explains:
“Those reports took our assistant accountant four or five hours every month. Now it’s a two- or three-minute job. With a click of the button, we can refresh the report and see all that information straightaway. It’s fantastic. So much so, that we’ve now taken the time to stop and take stock. And where we’ve created some spare capacity in the finance team, we can now do more of the analytical stuff that we should be doing instead of the administrative elements.”
He added that better integration brought further time-saving benefits, enabling the team to concentrate on value-added work:
“Because the systems talk to each other, our teams are also saving time not having to enter data into multiple separate systems. So much so that we’ve reduced our headcount requirement in those administrative areas, and been able to re-allocate that resource into client-facing roles, reinvesting in the revenue building side of the business which is really beneficial.”
Brown & Co is just one example of a professional services business we have been working with. Many others like them have invested in a central finance management system to cut out needless processes and reduce the burden lengthy admin tasks bring to its finance team.
When it comes to investments like accounting software, which is by no means a simple or easy decision to make, it’s the bigger picture often businesses look at. But ultimately, when you break it down, if you can give your finance team just a few hours back a week, it could have the biggest impact on their value to the business.
