Advisory: Finance

Organisations are constantly seeking to optimise the structure of their finance functions to improve their contribution to the business. Finance as a whole is expected to addresses the challenges of achieving appropriate standards of control, efficient back office opportunities and support to the business through insight and innovative solutions. Today, this may also include the possibility of shared services.

Clients can benefit from our end-to-end finance process reviews covering “As-Is” studies, gap analysis and recommendations for improvement, like to increase efficiency in core finance processes along the entire value chain. This includes interfacing operational activities with the finance function. Areas commonly covered are purchase-to-pay, order-to-cash, record-to-report and general accounting/closing. 

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SmartClose

Through this structured approach we can help clients identify bottlenecks in the accounts closing process/life-cycle, coming up with recommendations to close gaps identified and to mitigate bottlenecks to improve closing cycle time.

Corporate performance management

To help clients improve management information and prospective visibility we advise on the alignment of financial, operational and regulatory metrics, and improve the reliability and process efficiency of compiling prospective information. Driver based budgeting and rolling forecasts, dashboards, scorecards and KPI development to improve operational efficiencies measuring the organisation’s performance from customer, operational, organisational and financial perspectives.

Controls and finance policies and procedures

Through an “As-Is” process review we can help clients assess the adequacy of financial controls, thus ensuring that proper controls are in place. We also review policies and procedures for Group standardisation and compliance to generally accepted accounting principles, and assist in the drafting of procedures manual.

Post-deal finance effectiveness

For a smooth and seamless transition post-deal we can advise clients on the consolidation of finance functions, putting in place standardised processes, streamlining group policies, designing the optimal finance organisation structure and finance personnel composition, improving the finance process, and putting in place a common financial platform.

Financial frameworks

We can help clients with the implementation of divisional accounting framework, project accounting framework, financial reporting framework, cost centre accounting and cost allocation models.

Finance organisation structures and skills set review

We work towards understanding our clients in order to provide relevant recommendations on implementing optimal organisation structures, defining finance skills set, drafting job descriptions and defining responsibility matrices for the finance department.

Others

Clients can also come to us for:

• Advise on working capital management (in consultation with our Business Process Improvement team)
• Advise on activity based costing and costing frameworks
• Support in conducting systems requirements studies on financial systems and business requirements, including user requirement studies for enterprise resource planning (ERP), gap analysis and recommendations on critical user functionalities to have (mainly SAP reviews), ERP and vendor selection studies.

Shared services

For clients who have an interest to explore this increasingly popular model, we can help conduct site location and feasibility studies, provide strategic advice on setting up Shared Services Centres, recommend migration options, advise on transition into a shared organisation, implement shared services programmes, review shared services operations, advise on off-shoring and call centre outsourcing.