Here are five goals for a finance team to score in 2023:

  1. A fast month-end reporting process. By now many of you, hopefully will have secured reporting results to the CEO by day three. A target all finance teams can achieve. If you think your business is too complex for this or that third parties are delaying this from being achieved you are missing a vital message. There is no right answer for the month-end. You are only seeking a ‘true and fair’ reflection of the the result. Accountants are artists not scientists. We sculpt the numbers. If you are on or very near day three reporting you next thrust is to Day one reporting. You will not be the first to climb this lofty peak. My ‘Fast close: A Guide to Rapid Month-end and Year-end Reporting – Toolkit‘ (120 page PDF whitepaper + electronic templates) will guide you through a step-by-step process.
  2. A forecasting regime built in a robust and appropriate tool ( Excel is not robust and career limiting) that occurs once a quarter before the next quarter starts. If you are updating your forecast every month-end you are in the dark ages. It is floored on so many levels. It delays the month-end, it is not a proper forecast (which is built bottom -up) and creates much number noise. The only businesses that require updates more frequently than quarterly are those subject to wild swings in key commodity prices or after an international calamity. My ‘How to Implement Quarterly Rolling Forecasting and Quarterly Rolling Planning – and get it right first time – Toolkit’ (110 page PDF whitepaper + electronic templates) will guide you through a step-by-step process.
  3. With one and two in place you are ready to tackle the daftest management tool ever invented, the annual planning process. It is flawed in four ways.  Takes too long and costs too much, does not help run the business as it is out of date as soon as the ink has dried, leads to dysfunctional behaviour, and prevents ‘value adding activities’ taking place as they were not in the budget. It has to be killed off in a Machiavellian way. You need to master “Selling change” so that management themselves believe it was their idea in the first place. It is best to get the annual planning done quickly and then move it to quarterly rolling planning. My ‘Rapid Annual Planning (Budgeting) in Two Weeks or Less – Toolkit’ (80 page PDF whitepaper + e-templates) will guide you through a step-by-step process.
  4. Focusing on your finance team’s aspirations and welfare. Each year you need to make the next year so appealing that staff will stay on and give you that extra year. There are many ways to make the finance team a place where staff ‘Skip to work’ and these include: focusing on becoming a better leader, making the finance team a great place to work and abandoning the broken and defunct processes that drive your staff mad. These are covered in chapters 1, 10,11 and 14 of my best selling book, ‘The Financial Controller and CFO’s Toolkit’
  5. Your year-end result should be your ‘month 12’ result. You can achieve this by:
  • becoming good at a fast ‘True and fair ‘ month end
  • setting a very tight audit close, not giving the auditors and the finance team the luxury of hindsight. Signed audited accounts by the end of the third week into the new year is your target.
  • recording all adjustments on an ‘Overs and unders’ schedule letting them offset each other. Only making adjustments with the auditors that affect the ‘true and fair’ view.
  • doing all the pre-work ahead of time and organising the auditors. The year-end should be run like a well oiled machine.
  • moving the year-end to a more appropriate time, where this is possible. Having month twelve as your biggest month is shooting yourself in your foot.
  • my ‘Fast close: A Guide to Rapid Month-end and Year-end Reporting – Toolkit‘ (120 page PDF whitepaper + electronic templates) will guide you through a step-by-step process.

6. Abandon the broken and useless systems, reports and meetings  Management guru Peter Drucker should be considered the Leonardo da Vinci of management  as he will be better understood and respected 400 years after his life than now. He said:

“Don’t tell me what you’re doing, tell me what you’ve stopped doing.”

“If leaders are unable to abandon yesterday, they simply will not be able to create tomorrow.”

“Without systematic and purposeful abandonment, an organization will be overtaken by events. It will squander its best resources on things it should never have been doing or should no longer do. As a result, it will lack the resources needed to exploit the opportunities that arise.”