7 ways to drive resilience in your finance team

How to drive resilience in finance

In a busy finance team, resilience may be the last thing on your mind as the day-to-day workload of invoices and POs keep piling up. However, a proactive approach to building resilience cements the operational capacity of the finance team and reinforces its position as central to the business’s success.

Ultimately, being resilient means to be able to withstand, and recover quickly, from any difficulties that you might face.

Here are 7 ways you can drive resilience in your finance team:

1. Share KPIs across departments to make well-informed, proactive decisions.

Incentivising other departments to cooperate closely towards shared goals creates an aligned, efficient team.

2. Keep tight controls on your supplier files and transactional data, ensuring it is accurate and compliant.

Accurate input = accurate output. Ensuring data integrity allows the business to be more confident in their decision-making and more efficient with their budgeting.

3. Monitor your transactions for discrepancies, enabling on-time, faster payment.

This has a dual benefit – it ensures incorrect payments are stopped before, and reduces supplier queries after, so the team can focus on business critical tasks.

4. Create a strong, up-to-date supplier file.

Monitoring your master supplier file data for changed and discrepancies allows you to spot potential fraud and increase the efficiency of payments. Checking against sanctions and ESG lists, and for low credit scores on an ongoing basis creates higher visibility of supplier risks when they occur, allowing for faster resolution, and early identification of supply and compliance problems.

5. Keep informed of new legislation and mandates to ensure compliance.

Being abreast of incoming regulatory changes allows you to begin preparing early and in detail so you can hit the ground running without team members being taken away from their usual tasks.

6. Keep up with technological advancements to allow for greater efficiencies and tighter processes.

Digital awareness and focus is key to identifying the latest solutions to your finance problems. For example, adopters of AI in finance have reported a 90% increase in accuracy, according to a Rillion report. When it comes to finance, the breadth and depth of available solutions makes it likely that you’ll find one that benefits your team (like FISCAL Technologies!)

7. Increase cross-departmental team collaboration and visibility. 

Bring teams together for proactive discussions, and regular useful training which creates change in the business. Ensuring all members can see useful metrics and information to positively reinforce the improvements made.

For more in depth discussion and actionable insights, watch our webinar with Ellen Leith, MD of Purchase-to-Pay Network