By Ryan Demaray EMEA MD for SMBs at SAP Concur
With businesses feeling the pressure of both the pandemic and Brexit, UK finance teams must not only re-evaluate their capabilities, but fully prepare their finance function with the right tools, technology, and people. Key to the ongoing success of finance teams in a new world will be delivering analytics and insights to support strategy and decision making. In the past, reporting and focusing on balancing the books was a significant responsibility of finance teams, but today’s landscape will require the sector to transform into a key driver of data-driven decisions within businesses. This article will explore the evolution of the UK’s finance function and what the future holds for it considering the many challenges it faces.
Tackling uncertainty with technology
To manage the economic uncertainty, businesses and their finance teams need a better visibility of their cash flow to understand where their money is being spent. The impact of Brexit will make this particularly important with expected fluctuations in currency this year likely to affect the expense claim process. In the immediate term, this involves businesses knowing exactly what’s coming in and going out at any time, and this means having proper visibility across invoices and expenditure. Paying invoices at the right time and knowing exactly when cash is leaving the business helps to maintain cashflow and prevent any nasty surprises down the line. Finance teams will need to turn to technology to increase visibility of invoices and expenditure and leveraging automated expense systems to make it easier for employees to expense invoices, submit returns and companies to process them.
New technologies promise to save costs, manage risks, and increase insight. To fully reap the benefits of such technologies, financial leaders and managers must embrace a new mindset and get better at processing and extracting actionable insights from large amounts of data.
Financial leaders must keep abreast of new technologies to determine how they can use sophisticated analytics to enhance their organisation’s performance. This will help finance professionals to focus on working on more meaningful tasks such as supporting the overarching strategy and shaping the direction of the business.
As the finance function evolves, so will its people
As finance teams become accustomed to using actionable insights from their data, finance professionals with wider knowledge of operational technologies will become crucial to a business. Building a function that has the right people and skills to compliment and get the most out of new technologies will be a crucial part of this. Success will depend on combining smart technologies with the intelligence and interpersonal skills of talented finance professionals.
Using advanced analytics tools to run predictive models and better forecast will become a prerequisite for finance professionals of the future. Financial leaders will need to understand the backend technology and systems — and determine whether they can help teams to respond quicker and gather insights from new cloud-based financial management systems. This will allow finance leaders to move beyond just analysing historical financial data to accessing real-time business performance metrics.
With great challenge, comes great opportunity
While the past year has been particularly challenging and transformational for entire industries and businesses – every challenge brings with it an opportunity and finance teams have an opportune moment to impact business recovery. The next evolution for the future of finance will rest upon becoming a data-driven function to drive decision making across the business.
To support this shift, finance leaders need to fully prepare their departments with the right tools, technology and people. Operating models must evolve so they are able to process vast amounts of data and extract actionable insights from it. With the right supporting technology in place including automated expense systems, finance professionals can remove lengthy administrative tasks and focus on upskilling and gaining insights that can shape the strategic direction of the business.
