What’s one way to get more productivity out of your finance department?

Make the finance department part of your inner circle.

The better they know what’s going on in the different parts of the company, the better job they can do working with the numbers, working with your capital to make sure you have adequate funds, doing the planning and other tasks.

Not just doing it on a reactive basis either, make it proactive. Bounce ideas off the person. That doesn’t mean you need to agree, but it will give you a different perspective from what you might be getting from some of the others that are confidants in your current inner circle. A finance person might just see things very differently then tip you off on ideas that would be very important to be successful at what you’re trying to put in place.

Unfortunately, there are too many cases where it doesn’t work that way in the company culture. Some companies have the mentality where finance is kept in its corner and does their thing, but does not get actively involved in the decisions of the company. It’s too bad because it came be very self defeating. By not having the perspective on all that’s going on in the company, a finance person is less likely to be effective at what they happen to be working on.

So to get more out of the finance department, so they can have a better understanding of the business, be more effective at what they’re going to do as well as give you some new insights, keep finance a part of the inner circle.