Peace of mind for shareholders,
directors and CEOs
What are outsourced CFO services ?
Imagine a finance function that is helping shareholders, board members, senior managers, and colleagues make better decisions, faster.
MyCFO principals work with your company's existing staff to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their functions, particularly in the finance and accounting area, but often also reaching into strategy, HR, customer and supplier relations, operations, and risk management.
We focus on making your finance department a valuable contributor to your company's success, rather than, as it is usually viewed, a necessary but little understood cost centre. Essentially, we develop your finance function so that it is never restricting the growth of the company.
We introduce new processes and capabilities, typically the higher value processes, and we coach, mentor, up-skill, train your staff to use these new tools. We improve the efficiencies of all finance functions, freeing up time for your staff to deliver those outputs which Directors and CEO's can use to increase sales, reduce costs, lower assets, realise cash, and reduce risk.
How do we achieve this ?
MyCFO provides highly experienced CFO's on a part-time or full-time, temporary or ongoing basis to companies like yours. You can work with a MyCFO principal for as little as 2 days a month, or as much as 4 or even 5 days a week, just as you need us. You get all the benefits of our knowledge and experience at a manageable cost.
As a first step, we ensure your finance department is achieving the minimum levels of transaction recording accuracy and is filing necessary tax and audit documents on time.
A second step is to introduce basic management tools such as management reporting, cash flow forecasting, budgeting, performance analysis, capex controls and risk monitoring.
Ultimately, we can take your finance department to the point at which it is a business leader, helping you to strategise, plan, prioritise, and execute.
How can MyCFO improve your business?
Successful businesses need to have high quality information and analysis on hand to enable good decisions. Ensuring this information is clear and available is a priority focus for MyCFO. Good information and insight helps your business in many ways:
Shareholder and company goals clarification: Why does your company exist? Do the shareholders have a clear set of goals for the company? Are the shareholders aligned in their goals? Does your CEO define your company's goals to achieve the shareholders' goals? MyCFO helps you achieve clarity on your shareholder goals and ensure the company goals are aligned to them.
Strategy clarification and development: How will your company achieve the shareholders' goals? How will you capitalise on your opportunities and play to your strengths? How will you communicate your strategy internally and externally to achieve maximum engagement by customers, suppliers and staff? MyCFO can help you choose the right strategy path to your chosen goals, balancing risk with rewards.
Planning: How good are you at defining which initiatives will be undertaken, when, and by whom? We help you to define as many of the necessary tasks and sub-tasks before we begin, ensure project champions understand the required outcomes and mentor them to achieve them, monitor the progress of the execution, and deal with whatever issues arise during implementation.
Statutory filings: Do you worry that you are not compliant with your statutory financial obligations? Do you worry there are skeletons in your accounting closet? Do you know there are! We help you with accurate and timely preparation of statutory financial statements, audits and tax filings. You have bigger things to be worrying about than such basic financial processes.
Management reporting: Does your finance department provide you with intelligence about your business performance in a format which is meaningful to you, and available when you need it? Can your finance executives help you to understand the implications of financial information for the performance of your company? Do you make decisions and take actions based on your financial information? We can help you to develop the tools to produce the information about sales, costs, and working capital you need to run your company better. We customise the outputs by country, by product, by Business Unit, or consolidated however you need them, and present them in any way which is meaningful for you. We also help you to understand the information you receive, understand the options available to you, and help you make better decisions, faster.
Budgeting: Does your company complete its budgets in November, or February? Are they realistic, or adjusted many times, or just ignored? Do you use budgets to monitor your progress towards your goals every month? MyCFO can help you produce realistic and robust budgets, on both a Profit and Loss basis and a Cash Flow basis, which are completed on time.
Cost Control: Do you devolve responsibility for cost control to department or Business Unit managers, or is cost control carried out centrally? Do you provide managers with coaching on their options, or just give them the data? Setting clear budgets by department, and giving responsibility to department managers is an important step in controlling costs, but we also work with department managers to help them understand where they are incurring cost, and their choices for reducing cost. We sponsor brave action and hand-hold those taking it.
Scenario analysis: Have you ever wondered what would happen to your business performance if you altered your pricing structure? Opened a new plant? Made an acquisition? Agreed to your largest customer's demand for a discount? Faced a raw material supply shortage? We can provide you with the likely answers to these important concerns, giving you peace of mind and the confidence to proceed.
Cash Flow control: Do you know where the cash is in your business? Do you have issues collecting the money owed to you? Do you know what your cash balance will be in 6 days, 6 weeks, or 6 months? Can you afford your growth plans? MyCFO can help you to produce real time cash flow management reporting which is meaningful to your company. We can also help you manage your cash position so shareholders need keep no more money in the business than is necessary.
Capital Expenditure control: Are you confident you know what the expected returns should be on your latest capex plan? Do you ever follow-up to see if the plans were realised? Do you have capex implementation overruns in both time and cost? MyCFO can set up a customised capex control system for your company helping you to implement new capex projects on time, on cost, every time.
Document management systems: Do you struggle to put your hands on important company documents when you need to? Do you worry that your insurance policy has expired? We can help you implement a simple document management system which helps your staff to make updates on time and allows you to put your hands on all company documents within 5 minutes. This adds more value to your business that you could ever believe.
Banking relationships: Do your banks understand your business? Can you respond quickly to their requests for information? Do their requests sometimes seem unreasonable to you? We have extensive experience in raising debt financing and appropriate working capital financing, and managing local and international banking relationships.
Board of Directors information packs: Do your directors understand your business? Are your directors helping you to achieve your goals, or getting in your way? Invest some time in educating your directors by giving them good quality information which they can easily assimilate, and help them to help you. MyCFO principals are experienced executives and experienced (and qualified) directors; our understanding of both can help you make sure each is supporting the other.
Legal Affairs: We are not lawyers, but we do understand the complexities of structuring enduring relationships which align the parties to any agreement. We work with lawyers to achieve the documentation of workable and mutually beneficial relationships. We have good communication, influencing and negotiation skills. We interpret and explain legalise for the benefit of "lay" managers.
If your company needs corporate transaction services, relating to such activities as company valuations, mergers and acquisitions, finance raising (debt and equity), balance sheet restructurings, or the sale of your business, MyCFO's parent business CSL would be pleased to talk to you. Please go to the CSL website at www.csl-asia.com for more details of CSL's transaction services and experience, or see the contact details on the Contact Us page to speak with us.