The Time Has Come for Finance Business Partnering

According to a recent survey by Deloitte, over 90% of public sector organisations are looking to increase their finance business partnering efforts over the next three years. 

As the public sector struggles with the worst financial crisis for decades, it is self-evident that we need finance folk who can add value to the business as never before. In many ways there has never been a better time to be a finance person in the public sector.

Magically, the shadows are all moving into alignment.  The new generation financial systems are quite capable of doing a lot of the stuff that used to fill the days of accountants, and that frees up a lot of time for finance teams to focus on the wider business.

That involves working with our organisations to understand the financial challenges facing services and devising new and better value ways of delivering them.  We need finance people to know how to encourage innovation,  to be commercially savvy, politically aware and to know how to build relationships and influence others.

I’m optimistic about the capacity of finance people to take this on board, and there are a few things the professional bodies can do to help.   Firstly we need to be clear about what business partnering involves:  it is a sea-change in approach and attitude, requiring us to do different things,  not just a relabeling of management accountants as business partners.  The professional bodies can help by spreading best practice. 

Secondly we need to redesign the way we train and develop accountants around the new model.  Business partners need top notch technical ability to deliver better outcomes as well as good balance of other skills.

And thirdly, and most difficult of all in a profession that remains divided in England between four accounting bodies, we need to break down the barriers between so-called ‘financial accountants’ and ‘management accountants’ and adopt a whole system approach.  Effective business partnering starts with the capture of transactional data and ends with the adopted solution to a problem.  Any step along way, the chain can be broken; at each stage the people managing the process need to ‘get’ business partnering.

All of these things will take time, which we don’t have,  So we also need our existing practitioners to see the challenge and the opportunity.   Fortunately finance people are smart enough and flexible enough to take this on board. It’s up to us to shake off the stuffy image and show our organisations what we can do.