1. Is your cash flow adequately covered or are you running into cash squeezes? Do you have to scramble to make payroll or pay bills? Is there adequate cushion with your financing, so that you know you have your next month or more covered or do you have to be very concerned about the short-term?

2. Are transactions getting processed on a timely basis? Are invoices getting out, bills getting paid, collection being made as timely or better or are they taking longer than they used to?

3. How timely are your financial statements? Are they coming out quicker or are they taking longer to get produced every month?

4. How reliable is your financial information? Are you getting greater fluctuations month-to-month that might not make sense? Are there unusual adjustments coming at the end of the quarter or end of the year? Do the numbers make sense?

5. How accessible is the information on a daily basis for running your company? Do you have critical information on your revenues, your cost, and your margins at your fingertips? Is it getting harder or easier to get that information? As your company grows, is the information being summarized in usable form such as on dashboards?

6. How connected is finance with the rest of your company? Are they keeping connected and understanding what’s going on in the rest of the company or as the workload increases with your growing company are they getting more isolated?

7. Additional value. Is finance continuing to bring insight, strategy and other areas of additional value or is it falling back into more information processing and just getting the numbers done?

Those are some ideas to give you a sense on whether finance is moving ahead with the company or is it falling behind. And eventually if finance falls behind, it can become a drag on the rest of the company. If you sense some acceleration is needed, consider what you might have to change whether it be the person at the top, additional staffing or development, or better information systems. Keep finance up to speed so you can keep up to speed.