How can your finance team collaborate more effectively?
One of the most overlooked aspects of a business is often the lack of effort to improve team collaboration. You might have extremely skilled and talented team members in every department, but it won’t help unless they all work together to grow your business.
Rather than making people work in silos within a company, an entrepreneur should push members to work in a manner everyone knows what the others are doing and how their own work affects the rest of the organization. This is especially true for finance team collaboration.
Capital is the fuel that keeps every business running. Without its proper utilization, businesses will plummet to their own death. The massive responsibility of using these funds in an efficient and sustainable manner lies on the shoulders of the finance team.
If it weren’t for these smart accountants ensuring the financial stability of your company, you can probably imagine where your business would be right now. Alright! Enough imaginative doom! Let’s look at what it is that makes for a good finance team.
4 common qualities of high performing finance teams
1. Collaborative
Any good finance department knows that the capital they deal with on a daily basis has to be utilized by the employees. Different employees in different teams have several requirements that they must fulfill. And in order to do so, they might need access to company funds.
For these purposes, it is crucial for financial controllers to understand the role each department plays. Be it marketing, operations, or sales, every team has its own unique monetary needs so that it can execute its tasks.
Only when CFOs and financial managers are aware of these details can they forecast to plan their quarterly and annual budgets. Without a clear picture of the business roadmap, the finance team cannot assign necessary funds to other departments in a proper way.
Collaborative finance is one of the traits of any high-performing finance team.
2. They use smart tools
Technology has affected almost all areas of business and so is the case with finance as well. Many tasks that finance departments traditionally spent hours, days, weeks, and sometimes even months doing can now be automated using software and completed within a matter of minutes.
Not only does using smart financial tools like Volopay make processes more efficient but also improves team collaboration since all the payments take place using a single platform. This also helps the team keep track of every expense being made by other employees and control the funds that they have access to.
Although automation is not the complete answer, knowing what to automate is. Smart financial teams use tech solutions to cut down repetitive tasks and leave crucial financial decisions such as expense approvals in the hands of humans.
A simple example to explain this is that tech software cannot decide whether an expense request is valid or not as it’s a subjective measure dependent on the company policy. But carrying out a pre-expense approval workflow is something that software can do much faster than the traditional way of communicating and receiving funds.
3. Diverse backgrounds
A good finance team member often has experience working with diverse teams in different industries. Each experience teaches them what kind of a role money plays for the organization. This helps in learning and adapting on the go to quickly shift gears when faced with a new kind of problem or situation.
4. Team player
Finance employees who make it far in their careers have more than just technical skills. They know that that is the foundation for their success, but what got them from point A to point B will not necessarily get them to point C. This is when leadership, management, and decision-making skills come into play for further growth. Not just for themselves but the entire business.
Why it is important to maintain collaboration within finance teams?
Maintaining finance team collaboration is important so that they know how the company budgets affect each team member. It not only gives them clarity on how the capital being assigned to different departments is utilized but also how crucial it is towards the successful execution of their tasks.
How to improve collaboration for finance team?
Here are a few notable ways to improve finance team collaboration and the rest of your employees:
Inclusion in strategic decisions
While business at the end of the day is all about numbers and money, there are many high-level strategic thoughts, experimentation, and observations that drive these business decisions.
Rather than having your finance team be an afterthought, you should have certain members of the department represent the financial point of view when making such decisions. This way, other departments will know what the financial implications are of making those business moves.
Use financial tools
Using smart tech financial tools may slightly decrease direct communication between members, but it helps to improve team collaboration. It does this by making processes much faster and easier.
For example, when you use a financial tool like Volopay your employees get the option to claim reimbursements quickly using the mobile app. They don’t have to wait till the end of the month anymore to submit their expense reports.
They can simply attach an image of the purchase receipt to the relevant expense in the app and submit their claims. This directly sends a notification to the financial controller and they can accept or reject the claim. What used to take months now takes minutes. In this way, the finance team collaborates with employees in real-time.
Using this type of software for collaborative work can boost the productivity and morale of all employees.
Creating an interactive culture to promote teamwork
No matter how busy everyone might be at work, there should always be specific meetings catered to promote conversations between employees, what they are doing on a daily basis, and their plans for the coming quarters.
These meetings help each team know and recognize everyone better and act as an opportunity to give suggestions and collaborate. It starts on a business level but eventually grows into a relaxed discussion between all members and helps to shape the culture of an organization.
Empower your finance team with integrated suite of smart financial tools
Two of the most important things for a business to grow and scale consistently are time and money. Both are equally important. And to make the most out of the time and money that an accounts team has, they should use spend management tools like Volopay that improve collaboration with team members.
It helps finance departments execute their tasks in a much more efficient manner than the traditional ways of handling finances. The software can carry out instant reimbursements, assign budgets to different departments, control expenses using physical and virtual credit cards with spending limits, and so much more!
As a smart tech tool, Volopay helps a finance team automate monotonous tasks and leaves the important financial decisions in the hands of the team members.