Finance Business Partnering is not a new concept to the many who have been doing it for years. What is new is that it has recently been given a new exciting title, and with that comes the fear that accountants and finance professionals need to be doing something new and in addition to their current duties.  And that they need to find time for it.

I am lucky enough to be in a position of having done finance business partnering for many years, supported by organisations that allowed the structure and freedom to allow business partnering to flourish. The majority of my time was spent with non-finance staff (my business partners) rather than accountants and FP&A professionals. Taking this into the consulting world where I now coach, mentor and train teams and individuals on how to be a successful accountant in the commercial world (or finance business partner), I have learnt many factors that contribute to success. And many that hinder that success.

Most of those factors relate to the skills and behaviours of the individual. But before we can address that we first need to address the common hurdle of “How do I find the time?” 

First and foremost is the realisation that you will never find time to be a good finance business partner if you do not make some changes to what you are currently doing.
 
The funny thing about time is that it never changes. For all my years on this planet I have yet to find a place on it that does not have 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute. Time doesn’t change. It never will. You cannot create more, you cannot lose it. All you can do is choose what you spend your time on. So, if you want to make “time” for finance business partnering, you can only do it by prioritising it. When I say prioritise it, I mean making a choice that you believe is going to add value to your organisation.
 
Trying to layer it over the top of a standard FP&A professional/team that has the responsibilities of month ends, budgets, forecasts, etc will not allow anyone to be an effective finance business partner.

When I moved from a financial control type role to a business partnering role, the first thing I noticed was the lack of control I had over the work I was asked and required to do. My business partners “to do” list was my “to do” list. I had a finance “to do” list of my own but I never got to it and this frustrated me. I couldn’t get to everything I wanted to and I found myself thinking “I do not have enough time”. The requests from sales, marketing, IT, operations, etc kept coming and coming. And they were all urgent and rightfully so. They were often customer-facing and at the front end of the organisation.

This is not uncommon for finance teams who are trying to do both the traditional finance and accounting, and also attempt to do finance business partnering. It is near impossible to be successful at it if you have the burden of standard finance and accounting tasks to also complete that are deadline driven like month ends, budgets, forecasts, etc.

So how do you create the “time” to do effective finance business partnering?

1. Free up your structure/resource

Having a structure within your organisation that separates finance business partners into roles that are not burdened by standard accounting tasks is critical. Things like month-ends, budgets, audits, etc are all pieces of work done at a specific time, and are often time-consuming and deadline-driven. Closing yourself off and saying to your business partners “Sorry can you come back in five days when I've finished month-end” is not effective. It does not make you useful and can contribute to you not being bought into the loop on important decisions. Accordingly, free up the resource to be able to service the other functions, all of the time as they need it.

2. Systems and process

Good ERP systems and BI environments can be enablers to effective finance business partnering or they can be a hindrance. Where you sit on that spectrum depends on the quality of systems and processes you have in place and keep maintained. Robotics and Artificial Intelligence are all the rage at the moment but few finance teams have the budget to implement at the moment. Unfortunately, you may need to rely on good old excel to get where you need to and that’s ok if it is controlled. Minimise the time spent reworking and constructing numbers and maximise the time spent analysing and providing insight.

3. Get the right staff member

Not all accountants make good finance business partners. Being a good technical accountant does not equal being a good finance business partner. Accounting is a technical skillset that takes years to learn and study toward. Finance Business Partnering relies on different skills such as applying those technical skills, relationships, rapport, trust and behaving in a way that other functions want to work with you. You are not a policeman and some accountants struggle with this. Try to identify a team member who can wear different hats, has empathy, curiosity (without being confronting) and has the agility to view the world through the different lenses and functions of the organisation, weigh up those views and make a considered opinion. 

4. Inject that staff member into the other functions

Just as important as separating the resource to perform this task, is taking them out of the finance function and placing them within the teams of the other functions. If the finance individual cannot be seen as part of the other functions team, they will not be able to build the trust, relationships and rapport with the other functions team members to be effective. It will continue to be a siloed approach and at worse an “us v them” mentality. Physically place your finance business partners in the other functions teams with a mechanism back to the finance team. Not the other way around, in the finance team with the occasional journey into the other function. This physical act will help you find the “time” to finance business partner and will signal you are serious about it.

Following the above steps is critical if you want to have “time” to finance business partner (and indicates you have prioritised it). By getting the structure and resource in place to be successful, the concept of not “having time” will be avoided, your organisation will gain exponential value from a skillset that covers multi-functions, and your finance business partnering journey can begin.

Find more information about Business Partnering on Andrew's website: https://www.andrewjepson.com/