How many stages are there for the continuous operation of the financial sharing center 0-1 and 1-N? What goals should be achieved at each stage? This guide to avoiding pitfalls of financial sharing will explain in detail the operation methods of financial sharing at each stage.
Many years ago, enterprises established a financial sharing center to centralize a large number of repetitive and highly standardized businesses to solve various problems existing in the decentralized model and achieve the purpose of reducing costs and increasing efficiency. At the same time, the centralized operation of business can also realize the effect of business risk management and control, and improve the quality of financial operations. Therefore, the positioning of the financial sharing center often focuses on "cost reduction" and "control". With the continuous innovation and breakthrough of information technology tools, is the ultimate value of the operation mode of the financial sharing center just "unmanned"?
Based on the present, the operation of the financial sharing center is facing many pain points.
There are four stages in the operation of the financial sharing center: the initial construction period of operation (unified accounting + standard process), the stable operation period (optimized process + intelligent audit), the mature operation period (multidimensional data + analysis and decision-making), and the excellent operation period ( Management improvement + external service). Based on many practices, there are different operational management pain points and requirements in different stages.
1. Initial operation period
(1) Front-end business side:
The degree of online standardization of business processes is insufficient, and the core business system construction does not consider the demands of business and financial differentiation. In order to meet accounting demands, a large number of financial work orders are created, and business personnel continue to convert business information into financial information through bills of lading. There are too many business personnel to fill in and too many financial personnel to review. The workload on the business side increases, and the risk on the financial side increases accordingly. There are many breakpoints in the front, middle and back offices of business and financial integration, risk management and control, etc. Such a financial sharing center seems to meet the conditions for going online, but in fact it has not achieved efficiency improvement.
(2) Mid-end system side:
The old system cannot undertake the transformation demand, and the replacement of the new system involves the coordination of multiple departments. Who will undertake the replacement and migration of the old and new systems has become a sensitive and vague problem. Therefore, one should think twice before assessing the capacity of the system.
(3) Terminal sharing side:
Pain point 1: The superficial process is automated, and the review still relies on manual labor
Although the review efficiency of the sharing center is slightly improved compared with the previous one, the improvement is often the online mobile approval (evolution of the approval method), and no longer sticks to multi-department coordination on offline paper materials. Auditors in the financial sharing center still need to spend a lot of energy manually auditing business documents, such as the compliance of the documents and whether the attachments of the documents are complete. However, there is no equipment for intelligent audits such as invoice inspection, duplication check, budget overrun or fund plan, resulting in very low efficiency of document audit.
Pain point 2: Poor growth and motivation of personnel, high turnover rate
Financial sharing centers generally lack professional competitiveness, so the illusion that "everyone can do it" has led to "everyone is unwilling to do it". The sharing center seems to have professional groupings (expense group, cost group, asset group, income group, etc.), but most of them are repetitive tasks according to the standardized division of labor, and a good personnel assessment and promotion mechanism has not been established, resulting in low job recognition of employees , High turnover rate.
Pain point 3: The overall operating cost is generally "three high"
High communication costs: In the initial stage of the operation of the sharing center, the division of responsibilities between shared finance, business finance, and strategic finance is not yet clear, resulting in high communication costs among the three. In addition, there are high communication and collaboration costs among other groups in the sharing center.
High training costs: In the initial stage, business personnel and financial personnel are not very familiar with the new business processing scenarios. During the initial stage of system form filling and the running-in period of operation methods, various systems, processes, and systems will appear during the operation And other issues, need to invest a lot of manual customer service to adjust the contradiction between business and finance. However, the reduction of local financial personnel will have an impact on the stability of the sharing center construction during the exploration period. It has always been a difficult problem in the early stage of the construction of the financial sharing center to "use" the system and "friendly" the system.
High cost of transformation: Based on the supplement and improvement of differentiated scenarios, the system uses continuous addition to allow various forms to "run through" and vouchers to checkout, without considering the overall effect brought by the superposition. Either the cost of customer development of the bilateral system is high, or the cost of shared savings is low, and there are always a large number of redundant form links and system interconnections between business and financial systems.
2. Operation stable period
(1) Addition of system integration
The construction of financial sharing system of large enterprise groups is generally divided into two modes: self-built and outsourced. Self-construction refers to the overall management and planning led by a specialized information department or subsidiary within the group. Typical representatives are technology companies such as Huawei. Outsourcing is another mainstream construction mode. Third-party software vendors undertake the project construction work. Therefore, a large amount of secondary development and adaptive transformation are required in the stable period to adapt to the company's diversified business and personalized business development. This also highlights the value of financial sharing in different industries and different enterprise applications.
Which modules need to be integrated for financial sharing?
What is the value of integration versus manual processing?
Many large enterprise groups lack the foundation for business-financial integration in the initial stage of financial sharing. For example, the standardization of master data has not yet been unified, but many financial information modules have been launched and operated. Therefore, in the stable period, we can focus on the analysis of the integration and optimization of financial systems and business systems such as group business financial accounting, financial budget, fund management, and expense reimbursement. For example: the most basic expense reimbursement information has documents in the expense reimbursement system, information in the financial accounting system, and control in the budget system. It seems that the integration is large and comprehensive, but the actual operation is redundant. What does the salesman really need to fill in? What is the key to the internal control system? What auxiliary information is required for financial accounting vouchers? Behind the information data chain brought about by the high integration of the system, accounting regains the essence of accounting (accounting requirements).
(2) Business process subtraction
When the financial sharing center entered the "operating stable period" from the "operating exploration period", the focus of the enterprise also shifted from business process standardization and accounting standardization to real business-finance integration.
Through the integrated interface between the financial shared service center system and various business systems, information interaction is realized. Sharing mainly focuses on financial information without business information, and fails to achieve real integration of business, finance, taxation. Previously, enterprises mainly focused on easy-to-standardize financial processes such as expense reimbursement, receivables and payables, fund settlement, and financial accounting. However, there are often inconsistent rules, more and more process settings, and different rules bring twice the process... …therefore, “subtraction engineering” is the key work during the financial sharing stabilization period.
At this point, the focus of shared finance shifts to operational management, from the additive thinking of constantly superimposing forms and interface docking to the subtractive thinking that should be accepted. In terms of addition, functions such as financial analysis, consolidated statements, account reconciliation, and customer credit management are included in the sharing; in terms of subtraction, such as organizing some receivables and payable forms into collaborative business forms, etc. In addition, process value needs to be assessed against four elements:
Business form-filling efficiency: Whether the business process of the enterprise becomes more streamlined, efficient, fast, and accurate, whether it can better meet business needs, and whether it can better manage and analyze data...can be embedded in the financial sharing platform Online collaboration manuals, voice customer service and other methods can improve the work efficiency and work experience of employees.
Document review efficiency: The standardized process can be embedded with automated intelligent audit tools, such as: invoice verification, budget control, triple-document matching, etc., to achieve cost control by reducing the waste of manpower and material resources.
Improvement of operating capabilities: Through online analysis functions such as purchase payable, sales receivable, and asset disposal, consider whether the aging of accounts receivable is included in the allocation and use of the fund pool to improve the flexible allocation of funds. Or achieve timely delivery of production and risk control and early warning of sales payment through timely sending, receiving, storage, and warehousing. As well as the analysis of various health indicators such as financial accounting and bookkeeping compliance.
Application of innovation ability: It can summarize the characteristics of business processes in different business fields, so as to correspond to various digital tools and report analysis, and can effectively display intelligent reports of different dimensions such as business indicators, financial indicators, and risk control indicators, allowing management Thinking more clearly. For example: real-time cost analysis in the manufacturing industry, sales inventory management, investment and financing model in the real estate industry, ladder model of marketing expenses in the retail industry, etc.
(3) Subtraction in the accounting manual
The rules and logic of accounting standards are limited, and the limited rule logic can achieve the effect of replacing manual accounting by machines through system process design. "Integration of industry, finance, tax files" is a concrete manifestation of financial personnel looking for answers in the process of information processing and decision-making.
Under the traditional concept, financial personnel seem to only understand finance, and business personnel seem to only understand business. The "raw materials" for accounting come from the business side, and business integration personnel are required to clarify the boundary between "semi-finished products" and "finished products", from the provider of basic financial accounting information to the integrator and "deep processor" of corporate decision-making information , from the "edge" of the enterprise to the "center" gradually. Financial personnel should return to the essence of accounting serving business development, "combine" and "deeply process" basic financial information and business information, and tell decision makers what to do and how to do it.
3. Operational maturity
The sign of most enterprises moving from a stable period of operation to a mature period is "data sharing".
If the financial sharing center wants to continue to optimize, its product and technical capabilities face many challenges. The financial sharing center is also gradually transforming into the digital center of the enterprise. But how to use and analyze the data? How to continuously improve the operating efficiency of the sharing center? It is also a difficulty in the operation of the sharing center. Therefore, we need to look at the "data" operation of the financial sharing center from a new perspective.
Enterprise operations cover many process links from R&D to production, marketing to procurement, sales to payment collection, and from cost to finance. The application systems serving various business fields have very distinctive features and require the assistance of corresponding front-end business systems. Therefore, data collection, processing, conversion and other processing methods have become the breakthrough point for the financial sharing center to apply these digital technologies. They provide unprecedented technical support for the realization of financial shared services to facilitate digital operations, and become the main technical driving force for the digital transformation of financial shared services.
The goal of the digital operation of the financial sharing center is how to use the concepts of native development, digital technology, data middle platform, event accounting, etc., and use methods such as data collection, data processing, data mining, algorithms, and models to process a large number of internal and external enterprises, Complete and multi-type data, mine and release the value of data, and visualize the data to drive the digital transformation of the entire financial industry and give full play to the new financial value proposition of "smart accounting and value finance".
Yonyou BIP event accounting center, based on economic and business activities, collects the most complete, smallest granularity and unified business data. Its core is to use data to empower business, get through the underlying data, and realize data sharing and data modeling. On this basis, by combining management accounting with business-oriented, scenario-based, and real-time data analysis, enterprises can transform decision-making into actions in real time, and quickly form command-driven and control businesses based on the process collaboration capabilities of the system platform.
4. Operational Excellence Period
Enterprise financial sharing centers at this stage have generally been in operation for 8 years or more, and they have established a relatively complete operation management system. Enterprises in the traditional excellent operation period mainly consider the improvement of self-examination management and settlement management of external services, the establishment of long-term operation mechanism, and the deepening of the application of intelligent technology. However, standing on the cusp of AI popularization and application, at this stage, most companies are no longer considering operations but operations, transitioning from cost centers to profit centers, and from internal empowerment to external services. Two-way cost and income Control.
In the period of operational excellence, it is often necessary to consider the following three operational objectives:
(1) Shared service pricing and settlement
Outsourcing and being outsourced is one of the important future operation trends of shared service centers. How to divide and clarify shared responsibilities and charge pricing manual? At the same time, without signing an SLA, how to form a charging mechanism for internal subsidiaries and an external service accounting service mechanism? The financial sharing center can act as a service provider to provide professional support to internal and external customers of the enterprise, operate independently and create value. Therefore, the statistical processing cost of each document in the shared service center is the basis for pricing, and the business processing quality, business processing timeliness and service satisfaction are the most important criteria for evaluating the service level of the shared service center.
(2) Intelligent application research and development and investment
The basic business of the financial sharing center has been popularized through technical tools such as intelligent form filling and intelligent auditing. A large number of PRA robots have replaced manual operations in the process of reconciliation, auditing, and account entry. From the design of document rules to the accounting engine, intelligence has been deepened. to the job processing center for each process. At this time, increasing R&D investment costs and sharing operating profits will become opposites. Based on a large number of customer development work on the basis of third-party products, whether the value of external bookkeeping services can be empowered is also a difficult point of discussion in the industry. For enterprises, the construction of a financial sharing center is not only a revolution in technology investment, but also a revolution in business philosophy. It requires the high participation of enterprise management, the full investment of various resources, the flexible use of scientific methodology and an endless stream of innovative power. Therefore, the leadership needs to be more determined to continue to invest in the financial sharing center and deepen the business philosophy.
(3) Reservoir for project managers of industry and finance
The financial shared operation and management goals of enterprises in the excellent operation period are mainly to establish a continuous and long-term operation optimization mechanism, improve service levels, and accelerate the process of intelligence. Specialized division of labor, continuous refinement and standardization of work content to improve organizational efficiency, as well as organizational design and process matching, each process team as an organizational unit is the most important consideration in the internal organizational structure design of the shared service center. Therefore, the leaders of each financial sharing group first need to have professional process design capabilities, followed by the integration capabilities of the business and financial thinking system, and the integration capabilities of system construction and integration. From the perspective of exporting profit centers, industry and financial talents are more inclined to the role of project managers. They undertake the integration of consulting and implementation of project landing capabilities, which can provide guarantee capabilities for the rapid launch of internal businesses in the future, and provide management consulting and external projects for external projects. landing ability.