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Finance/Accounting department: From haywire to straight lines

This is a few lines describing senior partner Mette-Lise Vraa’s methodology working as a consultant on an assignment. Please do not hesitate to reach out, if you would like to learn more about how we can help your company (info@nordic-aim.com or phone +45 50 66 78 00).

Companies often reach out to me as a consultant, due to issues relating to missing / lacking deliveries, errors in numbers and reporting, missing overviews, cash flow issues, errors, system issues, increase in staff absence / sick leaves, issues regarding outsourcing etc.

When I begin the assignment and things start to unfold, I often find that things are in a worse state than initially described. I start to analyze what is causing the issues, and in almost all cases it has nothing to do with neither people nor systems, but are related to implementations, interactions and/or processes (most often lack of good processes).

When I start a new assignment, I spend my first weeks digging into systems and processes (doing my tasks if that is part of my SoW) and talking to as many people as possible. Here I find the knowledge of what is done, when and why. I also get to hear how they look at the problems, and why they think that something has gone wrong. Often they also know how to fix things. Of course I also speak to the management, where I get the strategic knowledge, but I do gain more insight on the issues from the department staff.

I give a lot of myself to support the team. It is essential for me to understand and support them, because the team must be part of the solution – perhaps assisted by external resources.

I fairly quickly set up three main targets, each supported by an overall purpose, to help people understand why they have to focus on these areas.

These three targets should all support the main strategy/goals for the company. This is the way I ensure that whatever I do, it has to have a meaningful purpose. Then I break down these targets into a Master Action Plan: deliveries, deadline and responsible (always have only ONE main responsible). It is essential to be able to measure progress; in fact to celebrate a goal achievement (both individual and the entire team) is such a powerful act. This also helps the management to follow up on my action points and progress.

A job well done to me is a job, where my value add heavily exceeds my cost. First of all, to have fixed the main problem I was hired to fixed. But also to leave the department in a better state than when I arrived: having added value both in $, but also seeing more happy people and better / more meaningful processes (digitalized, scalable and more robust).

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