Finance Benchmark Survey 2011 launch

This year PwC Kenya launched a new and innovative survey dubbed 'Finance Benchmarking Survey’. The survey explores the need for today’s CFOs and their teams to become true ‘business partners’ who add real value and insight to the organisation. It helps businesses rate their finance functions.

The preliminary results of the survey show some interesting findings:

• Only 39% of finance teams in Kenya are perceived to play a strategic role within their organisation. Is your finance function rising to the challenge?
• Some finance teams in Kenya take up to 20 days to close and report, whereas leading organisations are able to do this in 8 days. Does your finance function lead or follow?
• Only 25% of finance teams in Kenya use mature balanced scorecards for management reporting with an appropriate balance between financial and non-financial performance indicators. How can your finance function offer sharper insights?
• Over 30% of finance staff in Kenya, on average, do not have any formal finance qualifications. Are you retaining the right talent in your finance team?

Kindly note: If you would like to place your order for the full survey report, please click here.

We know though that the idea of embarking on a finance benchmark exercise can be an intimidating prospect. However, the practicality of our benchmark removes much of this concern and in our experience and initial feedback from participants, has the potential of 'baselining' a change programme that really makes the idea click.

By participating, they can easily understand where they are now, gaps against targets and measure progress towards their future goals. But don't take our word for it. We have more than 5o private and public clients who participated this year and are already in our database; and the numbers are growing rapidly. We presented the survey results and talked with some of the participants about their views of the benchmark. Invariably it has not only added value to them but strengthened their resolve to enhance the business partner relationship.