Finance Strategy

Globalization, merger and acquisition activity, cost pressure, emerging competition, and increased scrutiny by investors and regulators represent just a few of the business trends the finance organization must be prepared to address. Our Finance Strategy offering helps CFOs and their leadership teams align finance priorities with business priorities—and to put in place the tools, processes, workforce and organization structures to support those priorities. Our extensive strategic experience is augmented by additional services in the areas of organization and governance, and in compliance and controls. Accenture’s distinctive skills in workforce transformation help clients develop and sustain the right skills and capabilities in its people to add maximum value to the enterprise.

The Finance Strategy offering is designed to help CFOs set transformation priorities for their organizations with consideration for both their current level of capability and the specific challenges their businesses face. The Accenture approach to strategy development is informed by our real-world experience implementing solutions. This gives us both insight into leading practices that can enable step changes in performance, as well as a pragmatic perspective on what it really takes to achieve transformation. The knowledge from our client experiences is incorporated into our diagnostic aids and methodologies, enabling us to offer an accelerated and flexible approach to finance strategy development.

Some of our key intellectual assets include:

Finance Diagnostic Tool: An online tool containing diagnostic questions, leading practices and metrics across 16 finance sub-processes.

Transforming the Finance Workforce Practitioner's Handbook is designed to present a hands-on approach and comprehensive diagnostic for practitioners to investigate human performance capabilities from a finance perspective.

Finance Workforce Maturity Tracker is designed to assist in assessing the finance workforce against six critical human capital dimensions: leadership, organization, talent management, workforce performance, change readiness and employee engagement.

Our capabilities contribute significantly toward:

• Improved management information and decision making.
• Reduced finance function costs.
• Improvements in working capital.
• More effective and value-adding workforce.

Accenture's experts offer services in the key areas of finance strategy including:

• Finance Function Strategy—Addresses the critical needs of senior finance executives by helping them to identify the primary issues facing finance and the best ways to address these issues as well as adding value and an action plan for moving forward.
  
  
• Finance Post Merger Integration—Accenture can assist you to establish a comprehensive program to leverage synergies and to achieve a well planned and swiftly executed post-merger or acquisition integration of the finance function. A successful integration should focus on the following critical areas:
  
  
  • Fulfilment of internal and external reporting requirements
  • Controls over capital and non-capital expenditures
  • Harmonization of accounting policies and procedures
  • Harmonization of financial systems
  • Controls through planning, budgeting, forecasting and performance monitoring
    
    
• Workforce Transformation—Helps in the implementation of strategies that enable finance to develop and sustain the right skills and capabilities in its people to add maximum value to the enterprise.
  
  
• Organization and Governance—Helps in developing the optimal organization and governance design for the finance function to support the needs of the finance function and of the business.
  
  
• Compliance and Controls—Helps clients in developing a strategy to improve control framework and compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (and similar country specific legislations). Efforts include: determining if a compliance software solution meets the defined requirements, implementing compliance software solutions, designing and implementing controls to client's specs and requirements, remediating processes and controls that will allow a client to meet compliance goals, and providing PMO support for a compliance effort