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Becoming a real
business partner
In the first of three articles on becoming a real
business partner, Peter Gillespie explains the
challenges that Chartered Accountants will likely
encounter on the journey.
Imagine you’re a Chartered Accountant who has
decided to build a career beyond practice, but let’s
assume that you aren’t yet the financial director.
Obviously, we take for granted that you can
‘do’ the normal tasks of a Chartered Accountant
including accounting, tax, payroll, statutory
reporting, audit, treasury – the traditional finance
stuff. However, the business is really crying out
for you to apply your skills in other areas as a “real
business partner”.
This is great news, as you want to get away from
the traditional finance stuff. But, I’m sorry to say,
just wanting to be a real business partner probably
won’t be enough. You will meet many challenges,
the first of which is how you are going to work out
what the business needs in terms of management
information, and how to deliver it.
Management information
Management information isn’t codified in the
same manner as IFRS, for example. There will be
resistance to change, turf wars and egos to deal with.
You will be asking yourself from the outset why
you should even bother to push the boulder uphill,
as often nobody in management – not even the
financial director – expects anything from you other
than the traditional finance stuff.
Almost everyone in the business will agree that
there are problems, but nobody will have found any
realistic alternatives. Staff at the sharp end – the
ones who deal with the problems and deficiencies
on a daily basis – often have pragmatic and costeffective
ideas that could solve these problems, but
no-one listens to them.
Strangely, management may not even understand
the concept of management information. In my
experience, they tend not to trust the numbers and
are therefore free to make unconstrained decisions.
Furthermore, despite having the hierarchical
position and control over budgets to make change
happen, management doesn’t always follow through
in this regard.
I once had a quotation hanging on my office wall,
possibly attributed to Henry Ford. It said: “If you
always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get
what you’ve always got.” My then financial director
looked at it and said, in all seriousness, “That’s good –
so we shouldn’t change anything, right?”
What the business needs
Outside of the traditional finance stuff, you will
likely find the following situations in your business,
which will reliably point to where you will need to
act:
Everything is done in Excel: I’ve been using Excel
forever and still regularly find exciting new
functions, but when did you last understand a
colleague’s spreadsheet file? Unfortunately, we all
use Excel in individualistic and unstructured ways.
Multiply this across the whole business and you
have ‘Excel hell’ – a serious waste of time caused
by everyone “tapping in” the same or similar data,
and yet more waste when you have to reconcile the
various versions. The problem is getting worse as the
capacity of Excel continues to increase. You will need
to consider:
• How to reorganise the information and
processes to reduce the total number of
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