Upskilling for accountants

Reliable numbers produced by confident people

You’ve got the people, let’s help them do the job

Amid skills shortages, high salaries and AI doing everything, there are huge long-term benefits from building an in-house finance team that does the job your business needs now and will continue to do so in the years ahead.

We can help you make good people even better.

Get the basics right and build from there

Every finance team must have good bookkeeping skills and understanding of accounting and accounts.

The majority of people we work with have no formal finance qualifications and many that do will have struggled to transfer what they learned for exams into the real world.

So it’s important that we help them build their accounting knowledge and show how that knowledge applies to how they do their job.

There’s no escaping technology so we also need to make sure your team know how to use your chosen accounting software properly. It may even be that we suggest you change the software if that’s what’s holding your team back.

And then there’s spreadsheets. Everyone knows how to use spreadsheets, right?

Wrong!

So let’s get those spreadsheet skills sharpened.

There’s more to it than bookkeeping and spreadsheets

As the basic skills are being honed, your business continues to run so let’s get your finance function running in a better way.

The starting point is to ask “What information do we need to understand and improve the financial performance of this business?”

Having answered the question, we work backwards to make sure all of the bookkeeping transactions are processed sensibly to feed into a suite of useful reports.

At the heart of this is making sure your accounting software is structured to measure YOUR business as opposed to the standard business the software developers envisaged.

We also take a look at workflows and whether any apps can be brought into play to make data entry quicker, cheaper and more accurate.

What does success look like?

  • Monthly management accounts produced early in the new month
  • Better cashflow
  • Improved credit control
  • Less stress
  • Finance meetings that you’ll want to attend

A finance team that’s front and centre and integrated

Numbers reach across every business and therefore so does the finance team.

So it’s important that your finance team has a deep understanding of how the different parts of your business work and communicate with and listen to their colleagues.

There are external relationships to be nurtured as well. With customers, suppliers, banks, investors, HMRC and your accountants.

And there’s no substitute for experience. Businesses have cycles – month-ends, VAT quarters, financial years, budget and forecasting time-frames.

It can take a long time to see these cycles through to a finish.

But the starting point is to invest in your finance team and give them the tools do the job you need them to do