An Excerpt from Citrin Cooperman’s Four Level Maturity Model for Finance

Mature finance and accounting teams are one of the top value drivers for their companies. In this article, we will review five major benefits provided by a mature finance team.

1. Access top talent and avoid the return-to-work revolt

   • While 66 percent of employers plan for their teams to return to the office full-time, the majority of finance employees are interested in remote-optional positions, according to research from Robert Half. Their study also found that 40 percent of candidates who turn down a role do so because they want more schedule flexibility. Mature companies are able to offer flexible roles to align with the desires of top talent that are also highly effective. A growing solution to achieve a higher level of flexibility is to supplement the current finance and accounting group with an outsourced option. Outsourcing internal roles and responsibilities is a great way of adding capacity and flexibility within the finance and accounting department. Creating an environment that promotes flexibility allows companies to attract top performers and bypass the return-to-work revolt.

2. Enhance efficiency and improve work satisfaction

   • Improving your processes can give you back a significant amount of time and money. One McKinsey study found that leading finance teams were able to reduce their costs by 26 percent by optimizing their processes and finding new efficiencies. This is especially impressive considering that these companies were starting from a lower cost base than their similarly-sized peers in the market. Increasing efficiency has the added benefit of freeing your team to pursue interesting, satisfying work — not endless manual tasks.

3. Protect your data and improve decisions with strong governance

   • Gartner predicts that by 2023, 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies will converge simple analytics governance into broader data and analytics governance initiatives. Having strong governance processes in place gives you the confidence that your data is reliable, protects you from potential threat actors, and lays the groundwork for more advanced technologies like machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). You can only realize the return on investment (ROI) on these advanced tools if you already have strong governance processes in place. Better decision-making, with the support of today’s advanced tools, all starts with strong governance.
   • Data is the fuel the 21st-century economy runs on. Being able to rely on your data and leverage it effectively is key to everything else you do as a finance organization. By eliminating bad data, you can reclaim the 15-20 percent of revenue and 50 percent of your team’s time that MIT estimates is getting lost to errors, manual corrections, and workarounds. You will also be a better finance partner to your team — enabling them to help make the best decisions for the business.

4. Take advantage of technology to save time and money

   • Upgrading your systems and designing your digital ecosystem in a way that aligns with how your business needs to operate going forward (not how it did a decade ago) has numerous benefits, including reducing human errors, saving money, and saving your team’s time. One Forrester study, in collaboration with Zuora, found that companies that moved from spreadsheets to automated tools closed their books in half the time.

5. Better understand the future

   • Traditional accounting is designed to look at how the business has performed. The better and faster your accounting processes are, and the more future-oriented your reporting and analytics teams are, the more you can use planning, forecasting, and scenario modeling to make decisions based on how the business is likely to perform in the future. This allows businesses to scale and react faster to the performance of investments, products/services, and market dynamics to be more decisive as the markets change. Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) is a capability that many middle market companies do not yet have. If you can save costs on core finance by automating and streamlining processes, you can invest in high-value FP&A capabilities that give you these forward-looking tools to enhance your management decision making.

Now is the perfect opportunity for companies who are willing to make the investment in improving their company’s financial maturity. Citrin Cooperman’s Four-Level Maturity Model for Finance guide highlights our four-level financial maturity model – a tool to assess your business’s current level of financial maturity and chart a course from where you are to where you want to be. If you are ready to improve the financial maturity of your business, connect with our Digital Transformation Practice today.