Finance Consulting

No matter how lofty your company’s purpose, how skilled your people or how innovative your products and services, business success still hinges on your ability to meet financial targets. With economic uncertainty, organizational change and process complexities, most finance executives struggle to achieve this goal.

Without a clear vision, standardized technologies, streamlined organizational structures or access to appropriate talent, any planned transformation of the finance function can derail before it even gets underway. And without insight into the costs and benefits of your corporate initiatives, creating and protecting shareholder value will remain elusive.

Organizations need proven strategies, tools and methodologies to improve finance and performance management. They also need a framework for turning value creation into an enterprise-wide rallying call.

To meet the rising demands of your internal and external stakeholders, you need ways to enhance value across the enterprise. Typically, this starts by gaining an understanding of your current business strategies, processes, performance measures, systems and operating structures so you can identify opportunities for improvement.

Value creation and protection require integrated performance management, advanced finance systems and a mature finance function. Deloitte has the experience and the solutions that will help you stay one step ahead of the game.

Our Finance and performance management services include:

• Finance systems
• Finance transformation
• Performance management
• Shareholder value
• Strategic cost management

Finance systems

To meet the competitive challenges of today’s global economy, finance organizations must leverage IT to improve their capabilities in three key areas: better financial data and reporting capabilities, an accelerated close, and faster access to strategically important information. Companies that continue to rely on incompatible systems, manual processes and disparate spreadsheets will not be able to keep up.

Deloitte’s finance systems specialists draw on a wide range of finance, IT, data and business analysis experience and offer a variety of services. From system requirements and selection, to implementation and sustainment, Deloitte can help you expand, integrate and fine-tune your finance systems to meet evolving needs and deliver shareholder value.

These capabilities allow us to integrate data capture, transaction processing and business analysis and to address the key finance process requirements.

Maximize IT value with the right system

Finance system selection
As companies look for systems that optimize IT capabilities while reducing costs, they should consider a number of variables.

New technology continually adds sophisticated options and functions. To ensure an appropriate return on investment these must be clearly understood and their value justified. Your evaluation team must review multiple features to determine their applicability and potential benefits.

Finance systems investments are very costly and are expected to last decades. Deloitte provides a strategic, vendor-agnostic process for selecting the finance systems that are right for you. We can help:

• Assess your business and process requirements
• Define vendor selection criteria and accelerate the selection process
• Align finance requirements with systems capabilities
  

System implementations are challenging because they can create drawn-out project resource requirements that escalate costs and diminish expectations. Should a project fail to meet its intended outcome, the long-term costs can be formidable. With implementation and integration experience with leading applications we can help you adopt leading practice capabilities, including the process control automation, application integration and workflow-enabled process design.

We can also help:

• Reengineer business processes to maximize the value of your new finance systems
• Ensure your system configuration matches your requirements
• Match your business case with available resources to help ensure success
• Provide training, education and support to both end-users and IT support personnel
• Apply change management principles to help you gain enterprise-wide buy-in for your new finance systems.

Our approach to delivering financial system implementations uses Deloitte’s Enterprise value delivery (EVD) implementation methodology. This is an integrated, multi-disciplinary, approach that we use to provide consistent delivery across all of our financial system projects.

Realize operational and business benefits
Implementing the right finance systems can help your organization:

• Leverage the full potential of new technology platforms and finance applications
• Improve the quality of financial data
• Enhance internal controls and procedures
• Standardize and simplify reporting processes
• Inject greater transparency into your financial reporting
• Meet business goals by removing complexity and increasing automation in planning, forecasting and reporting processes
• Achieve enterprise-wide financial information consistency
• Realize long-term cost savings and efficiencies
• Move forward with finance systems that help you create and sustain shareholder value

End-to-end value
Successfully replacing or upgrading your finance system capabilities should certainly deliver bottom-line operational savings in the short term. More importantly, by improving access to quality financial data and enhancing controls, you position your finance organization to better deliver credible performance insight. Deloitte’s systems integration experience can make smooth adoption and transition to new capabilities a reality, helping you maximize your long-term investment in new finance systems.

Finance transformation

The finance function is being pulled from all directions as CFOs are asked to fill multiple organizational roles while continuing to instill financial discipline and drive value creation. For CFOs to meet their expanded mandates, the finance function must be broadly upgraded and its capabilities extended.

Every organization will take a different path on this journey, though many stops will be the same, such as designing new processes and controls; implementing standardized financial systems; or improving planning, budgeting and forecasting capabilities. Most finance functions have multiple needs and quickly discover that ad hoc improvements simply aren’t sufficient. Often, broad and deep strategic finance transformation is required.

Deloitte’s knowledge, experience, and proven methodologies can assist with each phase of your transformation, from technology selection, to process design, organizational realignment and talent management.

Finance transformation is a structured evolution
Finance transformation is a complex journey with comprehensive improvement potential. In addition to enhancing core finance function capabilities, it can deliver immediate, tangible results that build shareholder value. Just by optimizing processes and standardizing technology, you may be able to reduce operating costs by more than 30%. But finance transformation is a journey, and every transformation is different. We can help you strategically align and tailor your finance transformation to yield the gains your organization needs most.

Finance transformation provides lasting, organization-wide benefits
Deloitte’s finance transformation  approach is a multi-solution process that can help your organization in myriad ways:

• Implementing finance systems that support your specific process needs
• Improving information security and controls
• Developing strategically relevant business intelligence that enables better decision-making
• Integrating technology to deliver one version of the truth
• Achieving an organizational model that can support all finance roles
• Streamlining operations, eliminating waste, duplication and bottlenecks
• Leveraging our proven best practices database to accelerate improvement
• Developing an integrated strategy and vision for outsourcing

Leverage a range of finance transformation services and solutions

Improve finance processes
Although many process improvement initiatives focus on systems and technology, IT doesn’t drive the design. Often, underlying business processes need the most attention. Process improvement begins with operational analysis. Once completed, you can redesign business processes and your operating model to improve efficiencies.

Accelerate the financial close
In the last five years, dramatic changes have rocked the world of financial reporting. And regulators have responded. Stringent rules and heightened vigilance now make it more challenging to consistently deliver timely, accurate, reliable and transparent reports. Today, streamlining your close is less about efficiency and more about reducing reporting risks, controlling compliance costs and providing markets with increasingly transparent information.

Financial reporting and disclosure controls

Finance benchmarking
Benchmarking remains critical for gauging relative performance. Integrating benchmarking into your finance operations planning can help you boost performance, efficiency and service levels.

Finance best practices
Assess your organization’s key needs, and then adopt the best practices applicable to your situation. Leverage strategic insights to create a customized solution. Our global best practices database and proprietary ValueTools™ can provide invaluable help in designing and implementing new processes.

Fit-for-purpose finance organization design
We begin by helping you align organizational strategy with long-term vision to determine and design the best possible organizational structure.

Shared services
A shared service organization can improve back office operations while reducing costs up to 25%, enhancing internal controls and improving overall service levels.

Merger integration
Our research suggests that 70% of all mergers don’t achieve initial synergy targets. We can help avoid common challenges such as inadequate integration management, redundant systems and processes, and missed tax deadlines.

CFO responsibilities