Finance leaders: Are you ready for economic growth?
Economic growth is not a phrase that has been bandied around much over the past year. In fact, the stark reality is that the pandemic resulted in the UK economy shrinking by an unprecedented 9.9 per cent in 2020.
However, future forecasts are looking more favourable, with the Office for Budget Responsibility saying that economic growth will accelerate in 2022 at the fastest rate since records began, rebounding by 7.3 per cent. With growth on the horizon, now is the time for finance leaders to get ahead of the game to ensure their businesses are in the best possible position to capitalise on the predicted upturn.
While growth plans will differ depending on industry and individual circumstances, there are certainly three key elements that finance leaders should be factoring into their thinking as they look ahead.
Assess your current finance structure
It is a sad fact that since the pandemic began 693,000 payroll jobs have disappeared, according to the Office for National Statistics, with a further 4.7 million workers on furlough at the start of 2021.
The chances are that this will have impacted in some way on the structure of your finance team. Managers are now often having to take responsibility for more staff and there’s a greater need for employees to be able to work more autonomously and react quickly to change.
As we gear up for growth, it is important to analyse your current structure and be clear on the finance functions you need each team member to perform, assessing what tasks can be carried out independently, where escalation is required and the areas that require additional support and resources.
It is also an ideal time to review output and consider if some tasks may be more suited to automation. It shouldn’t be treated as a dirty word and it is often a positive step to involve the whole team in the discussion to identify those time-consuming activities that may be prone to human error. Areas often considered for automation include managing payroll, sending and receiving invoices and drafting MTD reports.
Realise the importance of integration
Standardising workflows has long been proven to increase efficiency, but if the past year has taught us anything, it’s that we need to be both flexible and agile in the way we work. Ensuring workflows are integrated helps strike the balance between standardisation and flexibility that will benefit many businesses.
Companies are also contending with the fact that team members are working in different locations right now, which can cause its own workflow challenges, particularly if it opens up the potential for people using different data sets. For finance teams, this can mean it’s difficult to access accurate data from different departments that they need to bill, report and forecast properly.
An increasing number of firms are set to offer home working as a permanent option; in March, Nationwide announced that its 13,000 office staff would be able to choose to ‘work anywhere’ as part of its new flexibility scheme. With different ways of working becoming more normalised, more businesses are seeking out solutions to help connect their teams and integrate workflows.
There has certainly been an increase in the use of single sign-on solutions that bring all applications together in one place. If you take our own Access Workspace as an example, it has inbuilt collaborative software for better team working and analytics that let you report your progress in real-time, creating single sets of accurate and up-to-date data. Solutions like this let everyone self-serve and continually post results that build into rich insights, based on real-time information, meaning teams are freed of admin and become more engaged, focused and motivated.
Finance leaders need to be using this time to assess if they are set up for true digital collaboration across the business. If your company is looking to introduce one all-round solution, you need to ensure that your financial software can easily be integrated into it to provide real-time visibility of financial processes across the business.
Have the right tools to scale up
We have already discussed how giving your business wider efficiency and insight will help support strategic growth, but all of that will suffer if your systems and processes aren’t equipped to scale up as you grow. Remember, trying to build on unstable ground will waste more time and money in the long run.
On a base level, accurate and real-time data will provide you with a very clear picture of the financial strength of your business, as it’s important to remember that growth of any kind is going to take some form of investment.
Working with senior leaders in the business to understand growth plans is vital for finance teams. If the plan involves new markets, products, services, mergers or acquisitions, finance leaders need to be making sure their teams are structured in the right way and that they have the right tools to be able to seamlessly scale up. If not, further investment needs to be factored into that growth plan.
If we return to the idea of a business using a single sign-on solution like Access Workspace, a pertinent question to ask now is how easy is it to simply plug-in additional apps and solutions as the business grows?
All of this may seem a lot to think about but, in contrast to the year just gone, it seems that there are set to be more positive times ahead, with the potential for business growth a very real possibility for many.
Find out more about Access Workspace and our Financial Management Software Suite.
