SHARED SERVICES

As your business grows and you begin to charge across divisions, you will begin to face new challenges, This is when consolidation and consistency of interdivisional accounting treatment becomes a challenge. This would be the ideal opportunity for your business to move to a shared services model.

A shared services strategy means creating an internal finance function that provides services internally across your organization. By leveraging technology and standardizing systems and processes, finance and accounting can be unified across divisions and locations. Typically, this will result in increased speed, reduced costs and freeing up your financial leadership to focus on strategic issues.

Shared services not only leverages the delivery of services across business units, it also means that the accountabilities and responsibilities are shared between the shared services organization and its customers, both internally and externally. For your accounts payable for example, a shared payables function will service multiple divisions, business units, or geographic locations. This translates into better allocation of resources, cost savings, more efficiency, and higher productivity for that function and your organization as a whole.

Finance is one of the slowest corporate functions in any business and most finance teams are under pressure to perform faster. Many companies turn to an internal or external shared services model to relieve this pressure resulting in increased efficiency and a streamlined finance function.

The Shared services approach can help you to create a reliable, competitively priced service where your people can be focused on their function and their core competency. One role has one function and does it very well rather than one person having many roles and having to have multiple areas of expertise. This translates into greater control over performance and reporting and, leveraging technology, better and faster data for accurate and timely analysis. This also will enable you to keep the exact same accounting treatment in the same account across divisions or branch offices giving your better clarity in your consolidated financials.

Shared Services Outsourcing
Outsource your organization’s needs to ECFO and we will create and manage your shared services function. We can work across divisions, offices and geographies to streamline and centralize your functions resulting in more control, faster speed and reduced costs.

Shared Services Implementation
ECFO will work with you to design, build and deploy your own internal shared services function within your organization. We have the knowledge and experience to help you get it right the first time in a way that works for your business.