Turnover in finance & accounting – What to do when a key member leaves?

In every business, no matter the type or size, members leave, and often they are essential employees. Turnover is commonplace and cannot be eliminated. The turnover rate can be reduced, but it cannot be removed.

Members decide to leave for a wide variety of reasons:

  • They find better jobs
  • They get offered a better salary at another company
  • They need a change in life

The reasons are many and are enough in numbers to make turnover a real problem and a common occurrence.

The central problem for businesses is when key members leave, and today we are here to talk about precisely that. But not in any part of the company, we are here to talk about turnover in finance and accounting – and when a key member of the F&A team leaves, many problems can occur.

A business needs to find ways to deal with such situations and remedy the fallout.

Before we go into it and explain how to remedy the situation, we have to explain why this happens in the first place.

Why are members leaving F&A teams?

As we already mentioned, the reasons are many. However, only one reason is the leading cause and central problem of F&A team members leaving the company – the money.

However, we are not talking about them getting offered a better paying job, on the contrary, it’s the budget in the company they are working with that’s the problem.

Many businesses hire only one key member for their F&A team, which is often not enough. Sometimes, they don’t need more, but they still don’t have a big enough group that will support the critical member.

The reasoning for this is generally money – the budget for the department is not big enough to hire more members and spread the work evenly.

That’s completely understandable as each employee requires:

  • A monthly paycheck
  • Benefits
  • Free time and vacations

Each employee thus involves a lot of cash spent to keep and train them. That’s why it’s entirely natural for companies to want to save money by hiring fewer people.

They end up hoping that this one key member – usually the CFO – can deal with everything. They need them to handle both the tactical and strategic aspects of the business.

Tactical Operations:

  • Optimize technology platform
  • Transactions – low / no error rate
  • Pass audit
  • Management reporting and KPI’s
  • Real-time forecasts & scenario modeling
  • Acquisitions platform

Strategic Operations:

  • Right hand to the CEO
  • Understand business model and key drivers
  • Growth and funding strategy
  • M&A strategy

Now, that plainly can’t happen. It is much responsibility for a single person, and what happens is they start losing confidence in their abilities due to overworking themselves.

In the end, all of this grows into a problem for the entire company because the CFOs don’t offer enough insight and advice for the CEOs and other executives, which results in the whole company suffering for it and it puts a break on the growth of the business.

CFO’s role is changing

We can all appreciate that the part of the CFO role is a tough one. There’s much work to be done by people filling this highly coveted role, and their compensation is thus very high, around $130,000 according to PayScale.

The modern CFO is in an even tougher spot as the role is changing more and more.

  • They need to leverage so many things as we have seen, but they also regularly need to take on new duties.
  • The board and CEOs expect to get a lot of help from the CFO in furthering the growth of the company.
  • To top everything, the modern CFO is having even more problems with the software that was designed to assist them in their jobs.

Of all of these problems, software is probably becoming the biggest headache for CFOs. On the one hand, such tools are necessary as the modern company needs to deal with a ton of data, especially in the area of finance and accounting. However, that data can still take much time to become useful.

The software does its job, but it can often do it poorly when your team is not the one designing the software but only learning to use it – often doing an inadequate job. What’s more, money needs to be spent on updating it whenever necessary, or it will further the preexisting headache.

By the time you deal with all of this, you may be falling behind when compared to your competitors and the market.

If that weren’t enough, all of this makes the CFOs leave the company. If not them, then other vital members of the F&A team.

So what is the solution to this turnover?

The solution lies in outsourcing finance and accounting

There are many problems companies have with inefficient F&A departments, and critical members leaving the company. The answer in the modern age rest in third-party vendors.

However, how does this model work and how does it change everything?

It’s simple – when it comes to Consero, our business is to help your company with its finance and accounting function in ways your in-house F&A can’t.

We provide:

  • Top quality F&A services.
  • Highly trained and experienced F&A teams that can either assist your existing F&A or completely administer and manage all F&A tasks.
  • Constant communication between our teams and yours, to enable smooth cooperation and thus more accessible and faster growth.
  • A complete solution for your financial problems – accounting, finance services, controller services, and bookkeeping
  • An advanced cloud software platform called SIMPL that deals with mountains of data and is updated continuously, all to achieve maximum efficiency.
  • Assistance and consulting for the CFO

This highly effective model is the model we perfected over years and dealings with hundreds of companies like yours.

We manage the modern problems companies face today in accounting and finance through our extensive services.

Our services eliminate the problem of critical members leaving the company for the reasons we already explained, but more importantly – it manages to fix the issues that in-house F&A teams are struggling to deal with in the modern business climate. In the end, by eliminating these problems, we are allowing your company to continue and even speed up the growth rate.

Consero FaaS: Disrupting the Outdated Traditional F&A Model

Transformation
  • Cash to GAAP conversion
  • Clean-up work
  • Interim oversight & support
  • Accounting software Implementation

Build it Yourself Solution

  • CFO / Interim CFO
  • Consultants / VARs

Consero FaaS Solution

  • CFO / Interim CFO
  • or Consero Interim CFO
  • Consero Setup/Transformation
Ongoing F&A
  • Monthly financials
  • Daily accounting support
  • Management reporting
  • Integrate add-on acquisitions

Build it Yourself Solution

  • CFO
  • Controllers & Accounting Team
  • Enterprise Accounting Applications

Consero FaaS Solution

  • CFO
  • or Consero Fractional CFO
  • Consero FaaS Enterprise F&A Software and Services

New PE Platform Investment F&A Challenges

Founder Owned Company Accounting:
  • Existing accounting done on a cash/hybrid basis
  • Run on SMB accounting software and other disparate applications
  • Inability to produce auditable financials
  • Lack of know-how to develop projections & KPIs
  • No consistency/structure to customer contracts
  • Underqualified staff
  • Non-scalable manual processes
Carve-Out Accounting:
  • Required to move off parent company accounting applications in a timely fashion
  • Have to build an entire F&A team
  • No documented operational policies and procedures
To Optimized Finance & Accounting:
  • Monthly financials available in 5-10 business days
  • Audit and diligence ready support details
  • Integrated enterprise grade accounting software
  • Budget and forecast reporting
  • Business KPIs
  • Efficient & scalable processes for rolling in add-ons