Growing a business requires a close eye on what you spend. It may be that you are planning a large-scale change project where momentum needs to be created and sustained. Perhaps you need a Finance Director for an interim period, or you are looking to add expertise to your Board with a non-executive director as well as finance professionals. Or it could be that you have a bookkeeper or accountant who is capable of providing basic information you need to run your business, but is unable to provide strategic guidance to enhance the business. Our interim FDs can provide your team with additional skills to help you through activities and projects.
Cash is the oxygen of the business. When the cash runs out, the business cannot continue. Understanding the different elements of cash flow and the impact of each of the policies for these elements are critical to the success and improvement of Cash Flow management. There are many uncertainties in the current world economic climate and it is important to build contingencies in your cashflow forecasting. The plan has to be agile and adapt to the changing circumstances. We help our clients using an internally developed powerful Cash Flow Management tool that ensures daily cash flow management, weekly, monthly and quarterly rolling forecast.
CFO pays a key role in working with the Senior Management and Business Owner to define and help execute the strategies. The role of a CFO is far beyond the management of the finance department and producing financial reports.
As CFO our role caters to the following 3 broad areas
1. Don’t forget the basics
The bookkeeper of the Company may process the day to day data but the financial control and monitoring may still have gaps. We ensure that there are no gaps and help in upskilling the internal Finance team.
2.Giving you choices about your future
We work closely with you, the business owner, to identify the overall aims of the business, including the final exit strategy of the owners. Together, we undertake an exercise to understand where the business is now, both financially and within its chosen markets.The next step is to look at your long, medium and short-term goals that are coherent and concur with the overall business aims, with an overall aim of maximising the value within the business. It’s a long process, but at the end you have a solid platform on which to move your business forward in the way that you want to give you lifestyle opportunities you dream of.
3. Enterprise Governance
Enterprise governance is the phrase on everyone’s lips. If it sounds tough, it is – but don’t be put off. We’re here to help. Fundamentally, Enterprise Governance is just another way of saying “Organisational Accountability”.
There are two dimensions to enterprise governance:
1. Conformance
2. Performance
It is critical that these two dimensions are balanced if sustained success in business is going to be achieved.
An Executive Dashboard is a reporting tool that provides a visual display of organizational KPIs, metrics, and data. The objective of Executive Dashboards is to give CEOs an at-a-glance visibility into business performance across all units and projects. IFC has experienced data mining experts and functional consultants who can develop Executive Dashboards using a platform of the clients choice, for example Tableau or Power BI.
As a growing business you keep a very close eye on what you spend. You have a bookkeeper or accountant who is capable of providing much of the information you need to run your business, but find that while the basic financial jobs get done there are gaps. You would like:
1. Adequate financial and budgetary control that is appropriate to that business.
2. Assurance that you are complying with appropriate accounting standards and controls.
3. Integration of management information from sources other than accounts, and translation of financial information, to provide relevant and reliable decision making data.
4. Someone with a sound knowledge of your business to run financial relationships with external bodies (banks, venture capitalists, auditors, tax advisors).
5. A helping hand when there simply aren’t enough hands to get the work done, perhaps around the time of the financial year end.