5 ways to upgrade your finance team
August 07, 2023
By Tim Jung, CPA/MBA, CFO
Building a finance team with defined roles and clear procedures is critical as your company grows. Too many companies believe the finance and accounting arm somehow works like gravity, but everything will eventually come crashing down without an upgrade to well-defined finance structures.
By taking a series of concrete actions, CFOs can help their finance department overcome growing pains and evolve into a well-oiled machine. The following steps help will CFOs upgrade their finance department, reduce complexities, and become the effective finance leader a maturing company needs.
1. Assess Current Finance Team Talent
To begin upgrading your team, start with stabilizing the current situation.
That’s where finance team members enter the picture. Assess their work based on timeliness, accuracy, and completeness. Can they work independently on tasks and collaborate with others to complete group projects?
In addition, look for skill gaps. Most of the U.S. workforce (58%) need new skills to do their jobs, according to research from Gartner. Korn Ferry projects that if 85 million jobs go unfilled due to a lack of skills by 2030, it would result in $8.5 trillion in unrealized business revenue. Sometimes you will have to upgrade the person, and sometimes you will have to upgrade the position.
/MBA, is a director at CFO Consulting Partners and has held leadership positions in the U.S., Europe, and Asia for complex global banking businesses, as well as nonprofit and for-profit organizations.