How to Spend Your Time to Increase Value as a Financial Business Partner
As the financial business partner, it’s important to decide how to best spend your time. You can rely on the financial information you’re given, processing it as thoroughly as possible to identify opportunities to increase value within the business, or you can focus on verifying the information is correct so you can be sure your partners have the right projections when they make decisions about the use of resources within their budgets and the allocation of budget resources for the next quarter. Both add value to the business overall, and both are necessary, but it can be easy to lose sight of one and focus exclusively on the other if you aren’t careful.
It’s easy to say you should trust your partners and the employees under you to provide accurate information, but business finances are complex and it’s easy to make mistakes even when you are the person whose job it is to keep everything straight. You can know everything you need to know and still simply transpose numbers or introduce other minor errors. That’s why oversight is so important—it’s not about whether you trust every business partner to be diligent, it’s about the fact that everyone is human and small errors add up.
On the other hand, though, there’s no one as suited to the task of identifying where value is lost and how to restructure to capture it. If you don’t take the information you have and work on that goal for your business, no one else will, either. So you can’t ignore it completely, but you don’t want to base those projections on inaccurate information either.
The key to maximizing your value added to the business as a partner is making sure you establish oversight processes that allow for the verification of information without your constant attention on the subject. When you create an efficient verification process, you can split your time as a business partner between auditing that process to ensure your information is good and manipulating the information to uncover new opportunities for your company.
The financial partner in any business is crucial, and you’re going to need to be a key support player for every other partner if everyone is going to pull together to create a successful company. You also need to understand that accurate information is the key to doing your job the right way and shaping your company into the powerhouse you know it can be.
