Finance Business Partnering

Thanks for all of you who responded to my recent survey and I have summarised your views below.

At a recent business partnering conference which I was facilitating I was shocked to find some delegates were previously working as management accountants and had been rebranded Finance business partners were looking to me to covert them into this new role in a couple of days. To become successful requires much more than a new coat of paint and requires a re-engineering of behaviours.

Academics comment on how it is changing the role of finance and how everyone is embracing the role but from my recent exposure to many finance business partners I was not so sure and decided to conduct my own research to see what was happening. I simply asked a series of short questions to a cross section of about 700 finance staff ranging in a variety of roles from CFO to NQ’s working in a cross section of organisations. 25% worked in organisations with  greater than 54 000 employees with the rest evenly spread.

I wanted to see what their take on finance partnering was and how their finance function operated as I was not convinced it was how many articles would have us believe. Significant finding from this survey were:

• 28% spent >75% of their time on transactional accounting

• 22% spent <25% of their time on transactional accounting 

•  <5% spent 0% of their time on transactional accounting

I was also interested in the functional dynamics of the office. Often a finance business partner is more effective when not located in a financial silo but as part of a cross functional team. Significant findings here were:

• 72% respondents all sat together in their finance silo

• <10% made no distinction between functions

In terms of personal development only 22% said that this was part of an organised program comprising mainly communication and presentation skills. The main challenges that most people considered most relevant were those of resistance to change when trying to implement partnering and a lack of trust and communication amongst the senior management team