Finance partnering - a package of 10 Knowledge Bits

Professionals today are called upon to demonstrate their ability to be skilful and flexible, irrespective of their position, in how they influence others. As organisations become less formal in their power structures, and flatter and more flexible in their systems of governance, there is an even greater need for finance professionals to have the ability to influence other people.

During this one hour course, you will gain valuable insights into their strengths as well as development areas to become consummate influencers. By creating a greater awareness of the assets and skills required to effectively influence, participants can develop the strength, the focus, and the interpersonal flexibility required of great influencers.

When managing a business, leaders follow varying agendas and objectives in making decisions. The finance function is often seen as the key steward and guardian of financial value for the investors and will continue to drive the delivery of that value from throughout the business.

This course will introduce you to a clear understanding of the measurement of financial value; how financial value is generated from strategic initiatives, pricing spend management; and how the finance team can contribute to building value.

This course focuses on the need for the finance function, and accountants in particular, to have a much broader understanding of the needs of operational management. This has grown in importance as organisations move towards Finance Business Partnering. The course concentrates on communicating more effectively, recognising our personality traits and how we are perceived by others and how to gain more influence through a mutual understanding of the linkage between financial outcomes and value creation.

Empirical evidence suggests that for many organisations strategies often fail to achieve the desired outcomes that an organisation seeks. Much of this can be attributed to the implementation of strategic initiatives.

Negotiation is at the heart of many professional and business interactions whether with clients, internal or external, suppliers, colleagues or indeed, any stakeholder. The key to profitable and sustainable business relationships is the ability to achieve win-win solutions that satisfy all parties at the table.

In the new economic situation, the need to get the best deal possible is more pressing than ever. More than ever, the culture of negotiation needs to spread and deepen throughout the organisation, leading to a constant reduction in costs and improvement in efficiency.

Negotiation situations often go beyond the simple one-to-one scenarios. What happens if you are negotiating on behalf of someone else? Or your counterparty is? What happens if there are several parties involved, all with competing agendas?

This course uses the latest thinking from Harvard Business School to achieve sustainable negotiated agreements that satisfy all parties at the table, using powerful tools to deal with the most complex of multi-party negotiations.

This course is an informative look at how non-financial managers can present financial information with credibility and flair. For those people who find figures difficult presenting financial information can be daunting. This will also help you make sure that your point is made clearly to enable informed decisions to be made based on the figures presented.

Accountants and other managers wanting to know how to use both halves of their brain to get more from it, think both logically and strategically, and keep one step ahead of colleagues

In the current economic climate the reliance on the markets to determine the true worth of an organisation, through the metric of Market Value Added (MVA) has been challenged. More organisations have argued that the true worth of an organisation is its ability to generate cash for investors. As such it is argued an organisation that wishes to maximise investor wealth should adopt the principles of Shareholder Value Analysis (SVA) and make managers accountable for the decisions that they make and the impact that this has on the value of the company. These are taken one step further when consideration is given to whether traditional management accounting concepts of cost encourage managers to make short term decisions. Economic Value Added (EVA) theory argues that certain costs should be viewed as investments and performance measured appropriately.

As the world changes and finance becomes an ever increasing priority for most organsations, there is a recognised need for the role of the finance professional to change. No longer can the finance professional sit behind a spreadsheet or spend hours simply playing with a chart of accounts. There is now a need, and in a lot of cases a pull from the business, for a finance professional to play a greater part in the strategic decision making and planning within a business. This has created the developing role of the finance business partner.

This course explains what that role looks like and briefly considers how the finance professional might get more involved in ensuring the strategy of an organisation gets implemented.

As accountants increasingly break away from the stereotypical view of them as ‚grey people in grey suits’ it is ever more important to ensure that today’s accountant integrates into the business making them an invaluable part of the strategy development process.