CFO advisory services

How to create a leading finance function that delivers performance insight, drives change, embeds efficiency, and addresses risk and compliance

Today’s CFOs and Finance Directors are faced with a complex, constantly changing and challenging business environment in which their companies' strategies need to be supported by a flexible finance function that delivers transparent, efficient, forward-looking insight, while at the same time manages risk and compliance, effectively deploys and allocates scarce resources.

The balance of insight, efficiency and control will depend on the individual organisation, but many have had to dedicate time and resources towards compliance whilst opportunities to provide insight and improve performance are missed. High performing finance functions look to redress that balance.

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Successfully addressing today’s challenges requires top-performing companies and the CFOs who lead them to develop finance functions that excel at the following core capabilities:

Governance, risk and compliance

• To act as the company’s steward for regulatory compliance, internal control and adherence to accounting standards; to manage financial risks, ensure the integrity of financial processes and act as a custodian of the enterprise-wide risk management process.

Transaction process management

• To execute transactional accounting processes flawlessly, efficiently and using the most effective delivery mechanism, which could involve amongst others an insourced, offshored, outsourced, or shared service operation.

Corporate performance management

• To align the planning, budgeting, measurement and reporting processes so as to eliminate the gap between strategic intention and operational execution; to communicate the company’s financial performance to investors and industry analysts.

Business partnering

• To contribute to the company’s strategic direction, and to deliver forward-looking, on-point insights to drive and support operational and investment decisions.

Talent management

• To put in place the appropriate recruitment, training, career advancement and incentive programs so as to attract, retain and develop the best financial talent.

How we can help you

PricewaterhouseCoopers have developed our CFO Advisory Services team around the role and needs of today’s CFOs, Finance Directors and their finance functions. We focus on helping them identify, design and implement programs that tune finance to meet today’s demanding requirements. Our team members have a background of industry experience in finance, combined with specific expertise in accounting, reporting and controlling, finance processes and systems.

Our track record includes the following services:

• Finance Function Assessment & Design
  • Evaluating and benchmarking finance functions and helping define their finance vision, future organisation, and roadmap for change
  • Assessing current and future finance function competence requirements, roles and responsibilities
• Planning, budgeting, forecasting and management reporting (MIS) design
  • Designing and implementing management reporting, planning and budgeting processes
  • Putting in place performance management frameworks and techniques (including balanced scorecards, costing and profitability analysis)
  • Introducing cost accounting & performing profitability analysis
• Accounting process simplification & standardisation, including:
  • Helping companies achieve a more timely and reliable financial closing process through SmartClose
  • Simplifying and standardising transactional accounting processes, such as purchase-to-pay and order-to-cash
  • Evaluating the case for, and helping set up, shared services and outsourcing
• Finance systems:
  • Assessing, selecting and deploying finance systems, including ERP’s, performance management, business intelligence and reporting tools.