How Collaborating with Finance Supports Good Decisions
In today’s relationship-oriented business environment, who you know and how you work with them are as important as anything you do. Collaboration is just as essential to finance as it is in naturally “creative” functions such as sales and marketing.
When I first started this series of posts, I mentioned that it was in response to the thoughts Kelly Barner shared on procurement’s hierarchy of needs: first savings, then compliance, moving on to risk and finally — collaboration. So, for procurement, savings is the most fundamental need. No other goals or objectives can realistically be addressed unless the organization’s spend is being efficiently negotiated and managed.
CFO’s Bread and Butter: Compliance & Risk
Thanks for joining our series of posts comparing how factors such as timing and cost are seen differently by finance, procurement and legal.
Compliance and risk are no different. While procurement may see compliance and risk management as being a few rungs up their strategic maturity ladder, for finance — and legal, I might add — they are the bedrock of our existence in the organization. If a CFO isn’t focused on ensuring compliance and risk management, he or she isn’t going to be in that job for very long.
Timing is everything to a CFO, as they say, so let’s talk about the importance of timing in finance.
It probably goes without saying that accuracy is the bedrock of sound financial decisions. At the same time, often the pace of business requires finance to make decisions before influencing circumstances become certainties. As a CFO, my confidence in each decision is tied to how far into the future I have to project data in order to make a judgement call.
Continue Reading
When you’re a CFO – no matter what company you happen to work for – it’s hard not to take a straight line finance perspective. As the CFO of Determine, I’m constantly faced with the challenge of balancing the requirements of finance and accounting with the needs of procurement and legal. After all, they are our customers too.
You’ve heard the phrase “back to basics” countless times. And it’s an incredibly misleading message: That basics somehow equates with “regressing.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Honing your basic skills and knowledge is about improving, moving forward, excelling. Ask any top musician, athlete or craftsperson — basics make you better.
Three best practices you can use right now. Procurement often uses the terms governance and compliance to describe the “law and order” part of our responsibilities. Governance establishes the rules for enterprise purchasing and spend management, while compliance measures how well distributed buyers adhere to those rules. In a perfect world, proper governance would lead […]
The definition of spend management seems to be fairly obvious ⎼ it’s the management of enterprise spend, right? On the contrary, the practice of spend management involves more than just the simple tracking and monitoring of how much money is going out of an organization. Much more.
Give your organization a clear, consistent process for optimizing contract management. According to the IACCM (International Association of Contract & Commercial Management), two-thirds of participants at their conference a few years ago admitted that their companies lack a clear, consistent workflow for contracting. Some had no formal definition, while others had wide variations between countries […]
