Finance Transformation Consultant: What They Do & How They Help Your Business

According to expert predictions, the future of finance is digital: touch-less transactions, self-service products and services, and implementing artificial intelligence and algorithms to provide more sustainability and scalability for your team and employees.

As you begin to think of new ways to drive innovation in 2023 and beyond, it can be beneficial to take another look at your finance function with a finance transformation consultant to make sure you stay ahead of the curve.

Everything you need to know about Finance Transformation consultants:

• What is finance transformation?
• What does a finance transformation consultant do?
• When should you hire a finance transformation consultant?
• How can a finance transformation consultant help your business?
• Types of projects finance transformation consultants work on, plus examples:

What is Finance Transformation?

Finance transformation is a process that leverages people, processes and technology to rework your financial strategy and drive sustainable value, oftentimes with a focus on automating processes to produce actionable insights. It involves everything from strategy and vision development to hiring better talent and implementing new technology to support business ongoings.

Finance transformation activities:

• Process Design & Improvement: Reviewing people, processes and technology within your current accounting environment and providing recommendations on improvements.
• Order to Cash (O2C) Process: Optimizing the O2C process to ensure a steady cash inflow and the dedication of extra resources to additional investments for growth.
• Procure to Pay (P2P) Process: Analyzing how your company selects goods and services, enforces compliance and order, conducts receiving and reconciliation, and handles invoices and payments to make them more efficient through requisitions and approvals, purchase order management, vendor management, invoice matching, and insights into purchasing.
• Record to Report Process: Harnessing the power of technology to obtain more visibility and understanding of key business drivers to deliver a faster financial close, improved compliance, and better decision making.

What does a Finance Transformation consultant do?

A finance transformation consultant restructures and optimizes your finance function by helping people, processes, and technology operate with more efficiency. They rework your finance function by implementing more sustainable practices allows you to respond quickly to fast-changing economic and business conditions, drive strategic value, and make data-informed decisions.

A great finance transformation consultant will work as an extension of your business, allowing you to do more with fewer resources and helping you scale.

Skills of finance transformation consultants:

• Reviewing people, processes and technology to identify and implement more sustainable solutions and strategies
• Working and collaborating with high-level executives to understand key business drivers
• Driving financial system implementation and testing
• Identifying finance function issues and areas for improvement
• Advising clients on how to optimize accounting functions, internal controls, and more
• Providing guidance with financial process documentation, data gathering, process design, system configuration, and more
• Training users on new systems

When should you hire a Finance Transformation consultant?

Hiring a finance transformation consultant can be beneficial at any stage of growth, but it becomes essential when you’re looking to integrate a more sustainable growth strategy. Finance transformation consultants provide unparalleled guidance with technology implementations, process rework, and more, helping you save time and money so you can focus on roadmapping for your future.

How can a Finance Transformation consultant help your business?

• Allows you to make data-informed decisions, providing more business agility
• Provides real-time reporting and insights into important company ongoings
• Automates processes to save time and money while enhancing financial capabilities
• Enacts processes to gather more reliable data and safeguard it from attack
• Reworks internal controls and simplifies regulatory compliance
• Drives more communication and collaboration, fostering more company-wide alignment
• Develops faster business processes, including time to close

Types of projects finance transformation consultants work on, plus examples:

A finance transformation consultant works on many different types of projects, ranging everywhere from implementing a new ERP to reworking clients’ internal controls.

Let’s take a look into one of the Bridgepoint Consulting team’s previous experiences as an example of the type of projects finance transformation consultants are often tasked with. For a more detailed look, please head to our finance transformation case study.

In anticipation of exponential growth and because of an organizational restructuring, a client needed to rapidly find a scalable system solution that would provide consistent data through real-time KPIs while streamlining and automating their business processes. 

After analyzing the client’s people, processes, and technologies, our finance transformation consultant managed an accelerated ERP implementation, including architecting the financial application layer, selecting supporting software and handling contract negotiations, migrating data and reporting, and creating and documenting financial processes and internal controls.

As you can see, a finance transformation consultant’s role can take many shapes that will vary depending on your specific business needs — however, the end result is often the same: more independence and flexibility, better processes, increased profit, and a sustainable, scalable finance function to bring you far into the future.