Читать книгу The Financial Controller and CFO's Toolkit - Parmenter David - Страница 24

The impact of quick month-end reporting is a redistribution of work moving out of the low value processing activities of month-end annual accounts to the more future focused activities such as rolling forecasting, systems implementation, and advisory, as shown in Exhibit 3.3. This is often accompanied by a change in the mix of the finance team, which results in a higher percentage of qualified staff.

EXHIBIT 3.3 Changing the focus of our work

A rapid month-end gives the finance team more time for the future. There are, on average, 22 working days a month. For a day one reporting entity, the finance team has 21 days allocated to the current month and beyond. A finance team taking 9 days to report has only 13 days left, a 40 percent reduction.

It is important to cost out to management and the board the month-end reporting process. When doing this exercise, remember that senior management barely has 32 weeks of productive time when you remove holidays, sick leave, travel time, and routine management meetings. Thus, a cost of $1,000 per day is not unrealistic. Based on an organization with 40 budget holders, with around 500 full-time staff, I believe the cost estimate is between $0.9 million and $1.5 million.

Such an analysis can be easily performed by your accounting team in 30 minutes, and will be valuable in the sale process of changing month-end reporting time frames.

I have included a costing template in the reader download as a guide to this exercise.