Finance Function Transformation

The group has grown faster than the finance function was built for. Subsidiaries were set up in different countries on different timelines, each with its own accounting team, its own chart of accounts, its own definition of what a cost centre is. The local books are clean. The group view is not.

Month-end becomes an exercise in reconciliation rather than reporting. Each entity closes on its own cadence. Intercompany positions don’t tie. FX is handled manually. Different tax regimes produce numbers that look comparable but aren’t. By the time the consolidation is built, the data is three weeks old and the CFO is presenting numbers the operating teams have already moved past.

The deeper problem is structural. The business can’t be managed as a group because it can’t be read as one. Per-entity profitability is visible, but cross-cutting views — by business unit, by service line, by geography — require manual work every time they’re asked for. Strategic questions wait on data that takes a week to produce.

We rebuild the finance function so the group can operate as one business while each entity still meets its local obligations.

The work starts with a unified group chart of accounts — one structure, mapped to local statutory requirements, so each entity continues to satisfy its tax regime and audit while reporting into a single group taxonomy. Cost centres, profit centres, and dimensional tagging (entity, country, BU, service line, customer) are designed around the questions the CFO and the board actually ask.

On top of that, the consolidation logic: intercompany elimination, FX treatment, minority interest handling, adjustments to bring local GAAPs into a single reporting standard. This runs on a defined cadence with defined ownership, so the close stops being a heroic monthly effort and becomes a process.

The reporting layer sits above — group P&L, per-entity P&L, per-BU profitability, cross-cutting views by country or service. The CFO sees the group as a single picture and can drill from any board-pack number to the underlying entity in a click.

Where the existing finance team is the right team, we work alongside them and hand the function back. Where capability gaps exist, we flag them honestly.

A group close that runs on a known cadence rather than as a monthly emergency. Recent work has compressed the cycle from around 28 days to 10. The numbers the board sees are the numbers the operating teams are working from.

A single, trustworthy view of the group — by entity, country, business unit, service line. The strategic questions (“which BU is dragging margin?”, “which country is over-indexed on overhead?”) become questions the data answers, not questions that wait for a project.

An audit posture that holds. Statutory reporting in each jurisdiction continues to clear cleanly because the local layer wasn’t compromised — the group layer was built above it, not instead of it.

A finance function the CFO can take to the board, the auditor, and investors with confidence — one that scales with the next acquisition, the next country, the next business unit, without needing to be rebuilt.