If you haven’t set any work life goals in 2019 resolution, here are a few tips for you to improve on finance department in 2019.

Identify your financial goals

It is difficult to to plan a travel plan not knowing where you are heading. Does everyone in your team know where they are heading in terms of financial goals? Are there strategic plans for the finance team to provide support the general business goals?

All should come down to the key answer SMART – specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time-bound, which will ensure greater chances of achieving the business goals.

Once the answers to the questions are clear, the team will know how to influence the decisions and make a better financial plans for this year.

Access your financial health

As the financial year comes to an end, this would be the time to take a look at the bigger picture of the financial situation.

These check would have to be around cashflow needs, profit margins concerns, debt management, a glance at the credit rating, as well as taking control of the tax planning.

By understanding the above mentioned areas of financial in your business, you will be able to do a better analysis and take early action or even prevent unwanted outcomes.

Track your budget

Budgeting is very crucial for businesses of small and big size. First step would be to understand where the budget is being spent. Budget spend should be analysed and tracked at a regular and frequent basis. This will allow you to identify trends and patterns, where it might be unexpectedly high spend and too often. The analysis will allow you understand the budget spend in a more efficient and better way.

Automate your processes

Financial professional know the important value of financial analysis, as well as the time it consumes to run all those analysis, especially in bugger organisations.

Paper based and manual report generation wastes a lot of time. In addition to this, most of the paper based analysis is not in a standard format and not as accessible as we want it to be.

The answer to this issue is moving the paper based information and process based analysis to the cloud. On average 500 hours of work is saved when financial report generation is moved to the cloud based platforms. This would include integrated expense, travel and invoicing is in place.

Educate your team

Finance department uses its expertise and experience to run the finances of a company, but most often it is not used to support the employees of the company.

As an example, automatic enrolment workplace pension scheme contributions will increase starting 6 April, 2019.

As a finance expert, the finance department would be required to look into this case and find a way to accommodate the additional employer cost. In this case, explaining an additional cost being spent into pension’s account to the employees would be a great help too.

Celebrate the successes and never mind the lapses

It is a good practice to set new habits and get rewarded when you succeed in them. But playing all or nothing game does not sound fair and it’s a direct path to failure.

A research says that on average, it takes 66 days for a new habit to become a routine and stick. This would give a good start, and if slipped, just get back to the habit and continue with the plan.

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