Finance transformation

World events along with technology advances are combining to give the finance function its time to shine. As you look to automate repetitive processes, better partner the business to drive insightful decisions and recruit new analytic resources needed to upskill the finance function, you require a holistic view of what’s needed and the best options available to address those needs. Finance Transformation helps you continually adapt to meet the latest demands and unexpected challenges that come your way.

It’s time to look at your finance function through a new lens - strategically design processes that leverage automation to meet transactional and reporting requirements and layer in business insights to identify opportunities and deliver value.

PwC Finance Transformation

Move from transactional processing to strategic, actionable insights. PwC’s expertise, services and solutions help you accelerate your finance transformation, no matter where you are on your journey.

Finance transformation hotspots

Digital transformation

The pandemic has accelerated most finance teams’ digital transformation journey. Not only does technology help with the ability to work remotely, it also aims to increase efficiency by taking away the mundane tasks, freeing up finance professionals’ time to perform value-added activities such as insights generation and exception management.

Investment in technology is the top on the list for most CFO’s investment plans. In a recent global PwC survey, 73% of CFOs surveyed said that the digital transformation of finance divisions is a high priority for them.

Business partnering

In the next 5-10 years, CFOs are expecting a shift of priority in the Finance teams, from a scorekeeper to a Business Partner. To achieve this, CFOs arguably need to place more emphasis on improving decision-making that will help make their finance function better in forecasting and planning for the future, as well as data-based forecasts for to better support strategic business decision.

In our recent PwC Pulse Survey, business partnering is the top 2 priority of CFOs in 2022. 50% of the global CFOs surveyed have cited establishing finance as a business partner across the enterprise as their top priority. This is followed by 48% of global CFOs prioritising the building of predictive models and scenario analysis capabilities for financial planning and forecasting.

The goal? Shift to a modern finance operation model

Use digital innovation to automate transactional processing and enable strategic, actionable insights.

Establish a blueprint to your modern finance vision and strategy that will transform your people, processes and technology aimed at helping to reduce costs, and improve operational effectiveness and capabilities.

Services and solutions

Finance Target Operating Model (TOM): Develop the optimal Finance TOM to support your strategic objectives, with concrete plans on how to guide your finance team towards it
Visioning workshop: Explore the “art of the possible” of a modern finance function, through interactive and hands-on workshops designed to help your team rapidly innovate, transform and reimagine what the future of your finance team might be.
Benchmark and maturity assessment: Benchmark against your peers on effectiveness, maturity and costs of your finance function to better understand where you stand and the gaps to fill.

Implement the optimal service delivery model and organisational design to support the strategic objectives of your business, while driving sustainable cost savings, standardisation, quality, enhanced skills and capabilities, and agility.

Services and solutions

Service delivery model: Develop and implement a future global service delivery model, including shared service centers, outsourcing, centres of excellence, and agile finance teams.
Organisation structure and design: Establish the optimal organisational design to support the needs of the business, including role identification (traditional and emerging) and responsibilities, spans and layers, and interaction models to support the needs of your business.
Finance competency framework and upskilling opportunities:
- Improve functional and digital acumen and build a culture of innovation and advancement through tailored learning and development programs.
- Attract and retain the next generation of employees and leverage the gig economy.

Implement strategies to reduce operational complexity, streamline processes, and optimise the use of technology for your core finance processes: procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, record-to-report, and acquire-to-retire. This leads to improved efficiency, control and quality, lower cost, and increased capacity for business partnering and collaboration.

Services and solutions

Finance process and policy optimisation: Optimise and redesign your core finance processes and policies, leveraging PwC’s leading KPIs and digital solutions.
Finance diagnostics: Assess your current processes, pain points and technologies and identify gaps in your finance function that is impeding your transformation journey.
ERP implementation: Implement leading technologies to automate and transform your core finance processes, together with our technology alliances.

Evolve your analytics capabilities from descriptive to predictive insights by aligning objectives with enterprise strategy, enabling a data-driven culture, and implementing the right technology and enabling infrastructure.

Services and solutions

EPM implementation:
- Implement leading technology solutions to transform your FP&A function, with the support of our EPM technology alliances.
- Improve the effectiveness of your planning, budgeting, consolidation, and management and statutory reporting processes to enable better analytics, insights, and controls.
- Implement strategy linked planning process by integrating your strategic plan with the business and capital plan to improve the performance of the your enterprise.
Costing: Accurately determine the product cost of a unit of production or service to drive objective, data-driven discussions of your business performance.
Data analytics: Enhance utilisation of data and embed analytics and AI models into your operations to deliver greater value to your business partners.
ESG reporting: Support organisations in meeting their ESG reporting and disclosures requirements in this fast moving space where there are increased scrutiny from investors and consumers.

Case study

A world-renowned university successfully implemented a cloud-based travel and expense management system, SAP Concur.

With PwC’s support, the system focused on improving the user experience by streamlining processes and gaining better control and insights on spending across the university.

Learn more