How To Improve Your organisations financial management

Stuart Patch
Jan 8
2 min read

Developing robust organisation financial management is vital. It plays a critical role in obtaining approval and securing resources for initiatives aimed at enhancing financial performance, especially in today's dynamic economic landscape.

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Recently I delivered a financial management course for a large metropolitan council. The attendees were senior managers who, it became clear after their introductions, were all very capable in their roles and were all achieving impressive results.

However, they had recognised as a collective they needed to improve their financial acumen to continue to achieve better outcomes for council. Below are three learnings the group took away.

1 – Planning and Budgeting

There is a fantastic integrated planning framework on local government and all in the room were familiar with this. However, understanding their role in contributing to the plans, especially the delivery and operating plans was a key insight. How to have input to the phasing of the budget to improve the effectiveness of their management and control activities was another key takeaway.

2 – Financial terminology

Whilst there was a conceptual understanding of much of the terminology, people had chance to consider how did it affect them and their roles. This is where the participants had chance to ask the questions, they may not get chance to ask in their day-to-day environment.

For example, operating or capital expenditure seemed straightforward, but what about software development and how do operating or capital grants get treated? And how does it affect what they do?

We were able to build a deeper understanding of financial terminology and how they could make better decisions in their roles.

3 – Importance of transparent communication

A key outcome I always hope lands with the group is that of communication between operational departments and the financial community.

Operational managers are not expected to be the financial experts, and it was great to see this group were already working well with their finance business partner. What was discovered through the session though, was the importance of communicating changing priorities, unfunded priorities and being accurate and transparent about forecast positions. It became clear doing this meant the council leadership can make the appropriate decisions to get the best use of resources.

In conclusion

A final reflection I would have would be to recognise the value of the CFO attending this session. Clearly this was not a course that directly benefited them, but they were able to share their insights into the financial management activities within the council and learn the challenges other parts of the leadership team faced with the financial management process.

Overall a very rewarding day.

#financialmanagement #localgovernment #nonfinancemanager