How COVID-19 Changed the Finance Function

In January of this year, the traditional way of running finance was still acceptable for many businesses. Annual budgets, average close cycles, reams of papers, and monthly budget to actual reporting seemed fine. Data requests from leadership cycled in and out.

Then COVID hit.

Suddenly, many companies were handling liquidity on a daily basis and needed to figure out day by day how to manage expenses and react to changes in their revenue. At the same time, the basic expectations of finance are different than they were for many organizations just six months ago. 

Finance is more important for the middle market than ever and the traditional finance paradigm is not well suited to an uncertain and unstable business cycle. All organizations now need to focus on where finance adds the most value, which is by:

• Generating accurate financials for management and shareholders
• Providing decision support to management to drive growth and profitability
• Making sure the business has enough capital to operate
• Protecting the company from the risk of fraud, malfeasance, and errors
• Operating at a reasonable cost 

How should finance leaders react to this shift? How should you decide what to do first and how quickly you can begin to implement changes? To answer these questions, we’ll first look at how expectations are shifting for each area of finance and how organizations need to evaluate changes to each. Check back next week for the second part in our Building a Finance Function for a Post-COVID World series. 

Want to learn more about finance transformation?

Guide

Re-Building Finance for a Post-COVID World: In this visual guide, Strategy and Business Transformation Practice Leader Steve Ronan, shares how the finance function has changed as a result of the pandemic, how to define finance excellence, what finance executives are (or should be) prioritizing now, the importance of compatible finance technologies, and how you can start improving the finance function for your business. Click here to learn more. 

Webinar

Missed our July webinar on Building a Finance Function for a Post-COVID World? Click here to watch the recording.

Whitepaper

Finance Transformation Roadmap: Download our complimentary whitepaper to learn how you can use process engineering and digital technology to close your books faster. Click here to learn more.