We work with your team to assess where you are in your Future Ready journey and then tailor a path forward to your needs.

We help forward looking CFOs use their finance team as a lever to help their organizations become more effective at reaching strategic goals. Achieving this requires quickly meeting the historical transaction processing roles using intelligent automation. This frees the finance organization to become more strategic in supporting financial planning, revenue generation, and effective capital investments.

Effective management teams begin with having clear systems of governance. We help organizations establish and improve their governance approach by helping implement performance management systems. We can assist in implementation using tools such as the balanced scorecard, OKRs (objectives and key results), and numerous others (see Beyond Performance Management: Why, When, and How to Use 40 Tools and Best Practices for Superior Business Performance by Jeremy Hope and Steve Player for a sample).

Today’s fast changing world makes it impossible to consistently predict the future. Organizations can best cope with this reality by shifting to an agile finance approach. Using principles from agile development we can help your finance organization become nimbler and more effective at rapidly adapting while moving to reach your strategic goals.

Traditional planning focuses on negotiated annual budgets, monthly variances, and forecasts just to year end. We can help you quickly move to driver-based continuous planning with a consistent planning horizon. In the process we will help you establish more effective target setting, a better understanding of current operations, develop the action plans needed to improve, and implement agile resource allocation responsive to actual conditions being experienced.

The heart of strategic analysis focuses on understanding cost and profitability. These are the necessary elements in developing a profitable business equation which is necessary to first survive and then to grow. Every business should understand its cost of customer acquisition and the related lifetime value of customers. We can help your organization develop profitability analysis, activity-based costing, the cost of quality, and life cycle costing. These elements are key to building a sustainable cost structure generating required profitability.

Implementing lean finance is much more than a cost reduction exercise. It requires understanding and applying lean principles to how the finance function can help your organization. This can be applied tactically to improving the transaction processing routines of finance (improving the paperwork factory). At a higher level, lean finance can be applied to the strategic finance aspects to help your organization become more effective when lean is applied across the enterprise.

One of the quickest and most impactful ways to improve finance teams is to develop more impactful reports. Future Ready Finance teams have moved beyond tabular displays of columns of numbers to leverage modern reporting tools that use intelligent design that leverages understanding of how our minds see information. This includes layout, color, and focusing devices that combine in effective storytelling. The move is from analysis to action planning.