19February 2018CFO InsightsLeading The way to Advanced AccountingBy Jennifer Templeman, COO/CFO, Jumpstart for Young Children, IncI believe in the power of creativity, in innovative thinking, and of play as a conduit to bring forth new ideas. And yes, and I'm a CFO who leads a team of finance professionals who focus on compliance, adherence to regulations, and perfecting the process of predicting and ensuring an outcome based on historic performance and data. Despite how at odds these two confessions may seem, they work together in a way that supports my belief that finance is a department designed to lead the culture in an organization. When I began my tenure at Jumpstart for Young Children, Inc., a national non-profit organization, bringing trained adult volunteers to under-resourced preschool classrooms to deliver an early literacy curriculum, I realized quickly that while the finance team was well qualified and did their assigned work competently, they were vastly underutilized. The organization was ready to create a new strategic plan, and wanted to innovate in order to more fully realize it's vision that every child enter kindergarten prepared to succeed, yet finance had no place at the table for these discussions. They were asked only to create the random budget or potential analysis. It was very much like having a highly rated chef and asking them to make nothing but sandwiches. It's not that the sandwiches wouldn't be delicious, but keeping them so restricted in their scope of work meant losing the potential benefit of all the skills they could offer to create a whole variety of dishes. To more fully integrate the team into the organization, we began by embracing a role I feel is unique to finance: culture leader. To substantiate this argument, I offer the questions: Who does the organization reach out to when there is uncertainty about staff, or employee changes? Who communicates the annual plan to the organization? When there is gossip about the future, who does the staff seek out at the water cooler and in the hall? In most organizations, it is assumed finance staff are the ones with these answers because they control the budget, and understand when forecasts begin to change the likelihood of the annual plan. If the organization trusts them to provide clarity in uncertain times, why would that natural alliance not work in times of expansion, innovation and exploration as well?Finding a solution that allowed the whole organization to have on demand access to the facts and figures they had previously been required to request directly from the department was the first step in reframing the purpose of the finance team. Once real-time budget to actuals and basic analysis could be accessed anywhere in the organization through a web-based solution, then the finance team was sought out less to provide numbers, and more to provide context. Being invited into a conversation opened the door for finance to be seen as a partner in planning, however, this did not mean the team was necessarily ready to assume this kind of role. Our organization has found multiple benefits including longer tenure of finance staff, and more integrated financial planning into new projects
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