Organization Design

Do you have clear roles and responsibilities in your administrative functions? Are reporting relationships well defined? Is there a succession plan for key positions? Organizational design involves crafting a model for the long-term success of the company – not just the organizational work that accompanies restructuring efforts. For a company that has created shared services for Finance & Accounting (F&A) transaction processing, what is left for the knowledge capital people who are not transaction process managers but may have been drawn into it previously? Direct reports to the CFO need clear re-direction to be effective treasurers, financial reporting managers, investor relations managers, internal audit directors, and shared services leaders. We help our client’s F&A leadership bring clarity to these knowledge center roles and assist in pulling them together into effective teams.

Finance & Accounting Service Delivery Assessment

The administrative functions can drive achievement of synergies in geographically dispersed companies and companies grown through acquisitions. Centralizing transaction processing into a single, shared location will drive cost savings and should improve internal service user satisfaction. This may have a tangible effect on external customers. For instance, if your customers see one sales representative for all products, then they would expect one invoice and remittance address instead of two or more for multiple products. We help clients assess their service model and decide which model supports their business best, whether it is shared services centers, outsourcing, or your existing model with process improvement. We help clients support the decision for implementing shared services including payback analysis. We can also help you implement shared services centers including migrating processes, communicating changes, selecting people, and establishing service levels. Mature shared service functions may have further cost savings opportunities if outsourced. We assist in outsourcer evaluation, selection, contract structuring, and transition planning.

Policies and Procedures

Policies and Procedures help ensure that all employees understand expectations and perform activities consistently. Policies and Procedures help communicate important guidelines for both the administrative organization and its users, as well as focus management on their expectations from administrative areas.

CF&W helps organizations design, document and communicate policies and procedures in the administrative areas of:

• Finance and Accounting

• Human Resources

• Procurement

• Information Technology

ERP package selection and design

CF&W addresses the key risks of a new system implementation: selecting the right system, process design, project management, reporting hierarchy design, security and control, and data quality.

• Package selection - analysis of software requirements and the comparison of software functionality and features
• Process design – designing and documenting processes to fit the company’s culture and processes with the new system functionality and appropriate controls
• Project management - applying a methodology to planning, executing, monitoring and controlling a project. We work with clients in establishing a methodology and toolset to manage projects and provide project management monitoring. Key areas include the initial structuring of the overall project with its sponsor, as well as "softer" areas of project risk, such as communications, management of change, and scope management.
• Financial Reporting hierarchy design - design of reporting structures (e.g. charts of accounts, cost centers) and the controls surrounding their maintenance to ensure better manageability and good data quality
• Security & controls – designing good process controls to ensure the financial control objectives are   achieved, designing appropriate segregation of duties into the security roles of the system, and design and monitoring of a good system development methodology to ensure the implementation is appropriately controlled
• Data quality - identifying the business and technical requirements associated with the new processes and system, establishing the applicable data rules, cleansing the data, and testing the data before populating the new system