Finance function diagnostic

The finance function diagnostic is a critical part of establishing where key issues lie and what core priorities should be for the finance function.

Usually, depending on where you sit, the issues will look different, but essentially always come back to one of the following:

• The system is no good
• The people in finance are no good
• The processes are old, manual and inconsistent, and thus no good
• It is the service providers fault, they are no good
  

Sound familiar? From doing numerous diagnostics in the past, we have found the same issues arise consistently and have accordingly developed a tool to help you identify the key issues that exist, relative to one another in the form of forty questions, along with some basic benchmarking to support the diagnostic. To date we have the the tool and its supporting algorithms extremely accurate in identifying key finance function issues.

There is also a danger that the finance function transformation project becomes a diagnostic only, and then is used as the tool to make changes, normally on the people side in the finance function. We do not believe this is the best approach. It is important to understand the key issues, but the approach to rectifying these issues should be holistic, not a single action. Find out more about how to do a finance function diagnostic and the questions that need answering in our project area.

The outputs from the diagnostic form the basis for the next phase of getting the basics right.