{"id":5859,"date":"2020-06-11T16:10:26","date_gmt":"2020-06-11T16:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sloane.co.uk\/news\/how-finance-can-chart-the-road-to-recovery\/"},"modified":"2020-06-11T16:10:26","modified_gmt":"2020-06-11T16:10:26","slug":"how-finance-can-chart-the-road-to-recovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sloane.co.uk\/news\/finance-strategy-news\/how-finance-can-chart-the-road-to-recovery\/","title":{"rendered":"How finance can chart the road to recovery"},"content":{"rendered":"

How finance can chart the road to recovery<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Over the past three months, finance teams have experienced first-hand the short-term complexities that come with the shift to remote working. The Covid-19 crisis prompted many of them to find new ways to integrate and stay connected with the wider business.<\/p>\n

Remote working accelerated the conversion of paperwork into digital workflows, while virtual environments such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meets took over from face-to-face gatherings.<\/p>\n

Finance chiefs Gemma Craddock from Amido and Access Group CFO Rob Binns joined us to discuss what they have learned during the crisis\u00a0in our latest webinar<\/a> in association with Access Group. During the 60min session we explore how they coped with the challenges posed by Covid-19, and even more importantly, how they are embracing more flexible ways of working to steer their organisations towards recovery.<\/p>\n

Crisis management<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Gemma Craddock is finance director of Amido, a business technology consultancy that helps other organisations overhaul their processes with cloud-based software tools. As a user of the systems it supports, Amido had few issues moving to remote working, she said.<\/p>\n

As part of the ISO 27001 certification process the company was going through, Amido carried out a business continuity test in early March to ensure everyone could work remotely. \u201cThat was well timed,\u201d Craddock said. \u201cAll of our employees could work from home before Coronavirus, so the test was to make sure everyone had tools at the right time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amido has a 31 March year end, so the lockdown came at an inconvenient time for other reasons. However, the company\u2019s auditors were understanding and worked with Amido to reschedule the audit and do it over a longer period.<\/p>\n

With the year-end sorted, the first thing Craddock then did was to reforecast and budget 2020-21 to reflect the impact of the crisis. This plan has now become a rolling quarterly forecast.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got an Excel budget model that takes sales pipeline data from our Salesforce [CRM] system and combines it with accounts data from Access. The processes were already in place and because it\u2019s semi-automated, the quarterly rolling budget is an acceleration of what we were already doing,\u201d Craddock explained.<\/p>\n

On top of that she used Microsoft Power BI to build a regular key performance indicator report pack for her board colleagues. These KPIs are now being used to track how the company is faring through the downturn and to communicate the situation to staff.<\/p>\n

Divisional variances<\/h3>\n

At Access Group, Rob Binns has a similar KPI-based approach, but a broader divisional structure, ranging from health care and digital learning to hospitality and recruitment.<\/p>\n

His reporting infrastructure, also constructed in Excel from different internal data sources, illustrated the impacts of the lockdown across the different divisions:<\/p>\n