0
0
You get what you measure, so measure what you want! Maximize performance with balanced critical success factors. This course defines the factors that contribute to your organization’s success and identifies the best ways to measure and report on them in a manner that inspires higher profits and better performance.
Learn how to design a reporting system that measures and keeps score of both financial and non-financial performance and develop a linked integrated system. Translate your firm’s strategies into key performance measures. Link those strategies with performance and define the most critical elements of success.
Objectives:
733562
Chapter 0 - Overview
"Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do." - Oscar Wilde
Course Objectives
Welcome to a workshop about measuring what is most important! You will leave with a clear path for vastly improving your firm's reporting process. This advanced level course will take you step-by-step through how you can turn any management reporting process into a world-class system. The emphasis here is entirely on internal reporting. You must understand the basic objectives for internal focused feedback and have a desire to improve your internal reports.
After completing this workshop, you will be able to apply techniques and tools to
• Translate your firm's strategies with key performance metrics.
• Articulate your firm's key strategies clearly.
• Define the most critical elements of what leads to organizational success.
• Link your firm's strategies with people's performance.
• Develop a pay-for-performance program that drives positive behaviors.
• Design a Balanced Scorecard with nonfinancial metrics.
• Use the dashboard to deliver a better way of providing feedback.
• Develop a plan of action to use for your own situation.
This workshop, with 25 best practices of world-class companies, is designed for CFOs, Controllers, finance directors, managers, and reporting specialists with at least four years of experience and the desire to improve their firm's (or their client's) reporting process. An advanced level of knowledge and experience is required for this workshop. The accountant without any experience working in an organization or doing management reporting will lack the basis to understand the principles and the overall process.
This course will be very different from the type of CPE you are used to taking. It is a leadership session about blending three areas of concern for CFOs and Controllers:
• Reporting timely and appropriately.
• Implementing a Performance Measurement System that stresses nonfinancial metrics.
• Using a balanced set of measurements that drive optimal performance.
By working in concert, the areas (above) result in
• The ability to fulfill the firm's mission and vision.
• Empowered decision-makers.
• Increased accountability.
• On-the-spot timely reports.
• A learning culture.
• The ability to respond faster.
• A flexible organization.
• Less hierarchy and bureaucracy.
• Greater profits!
This workshop will not make you an expert on the three areas noted above. It will help you understand why, as the leader of the accounting function, you need to understand and employ these most valuable accounting tools of world-class finance departments:
• A Balanced Scorecard.
• Performance metrics.
• Dashboard reporting.
• Real-time reporting.
Today's format will definitely be challenging to you and your peers. However, by the end of this workshop, you will have significantly enhanced your skills as a leader. The reason you will spend time solving other people's problems through the case studies is to give you confidence to tackle your own problems without engaging your normal protective rationalization.
Workshop Roles
Discussion Leader – To disseminate and explain the tools, ideas, and best practices.
Participants (you) – To contribute ideas, learn, explain, and apply the information.
Thank you for being present today!
Note: I use the term CFO or Controller individually and at other times use CFO/Controller. I am referring to the person who is the ultimate decision-maker for accounting and financial issues.
Note: Most of the companies and characters in the case studies are fictional. The firms and people in the sidebars are real.
Self-Assessment #1: Are You Ready?
Instructions
Complete this self-assessment to see if you are doing smarter reporting. Place a checkmark in the box of the questions that you can truthfully answer with a "Yes." Compare the total number of boxes you checked with the Answer Key at the end.
⟨ Are you valued for the interpretation of the information that you provide more than the report content itself?
⟨ Can you clearly define and measure what each operations manager describes as "the most critical work we do here?"
⟨ Have you highlighted for the CEO or board at least one unexplored opportunity – revenue, cost savings or productivity – within the last three months?
⟨ Can you take a whole slew of operational and financial data from multiple sources and boil it down to explain what the firm's performance will be like in the near future?
⟨ Do you spend more time meeting and advising operational managers and the CEO than you do scorekeeping?
⟨ Has your feedback information enabled managers and executives to make smarter decisions and can you measure or document that improvement?
⟨ Can you put your hands on your company's key operating statistics, both financial and nonfinancial, in less than one hour?
⟨ Do you know how a balanced scorecard approach works to ensure the strategy is executed properly?
⟨ Are you providing ongoing training to the executives and board members on how to understand and use the financial data that you provide in your reports?
⟨ Have you reduced the number of paper reports you issue by 75% within the last two years?
⟨ Do you provide a "what this number means" explanation to each of your internal management reports?
⟨ Do you have assurance that nonfinancial and operational information included in your reports is true?
⟨ Have you created a balanced scorecard approach for your internal reporting process?
⟨ Have you researched to see how soon you can implement dashboard reporting?
⟨ Do you continually seek methods to present information in attention grabbing ways?
⟨ Do you close the books 50% faster and issue your internal management reports 70% faster than you did three years ago?
Answer Key
14 to 16 checked—Congratulations, you are a feedback master! You know how to do smart reporting! Keep doing what you are doing and work on those areas you did not answer yes.
11 to 13 checked—Good job! You are effectively being a feedback master but there are still areas where you need to step up. Get started on those neglected areas today.
8 to 10 checked—You are reaching the point of no return! You have so many areas of professional vulnerability that you are already losing your credibility. Get cracking!
0 to 7 checked—You are a dinosaur! Ouch! You will be out of a job within two years.
You have
two choices:
(1) Get some practical experiences in smart reporting or
(2) Get out of accounting.
733562
Customer Service
Customer Service
Customer Service
Back to Browsing Products