Services

The CFO Group provides software independent advice and consulting on planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting and consolidation systems for medium/large and complex organisations across all industries. Our consultants are software agnostic as we believe that understanding your business needs are more important than the specific brand of software used.

Our engagements may be anywhere from a short advisory session to a large international rollout of a new system with ongoing future support. We can provide consulting on a new system, or a redesign of your existing system.

We provide an holistic service beginning with understanding your problem through to providing you with a solution. Our consulting approach may be broken into the following broad phases:

Analysis of the real needs for your system
We first learn your business, its strategy and key drivers and what information your system is really required to deliver. For us, your system is not just a list of fields or accounts in a database.
We use our business acumen and accounting skills to work with your senior management to develop what should be reported and focused on by your organisation. This is continually in mind throughout the design and implementation phases.

Our communication skills are one of our key strengths and our consultants will work with your organisation at all levels from the Board to operational staff. We conduct workshops to explore how your system should add value, meet with key staff, investigate current models and report back in a straightforward manner.

Advice on your planning process
Systems are not just about software. We work with you to streamline your planning process, from timetables to training to make sure that your group's time and effort spent planning provides the best result.
Our unique understanding of both your business needs and technology allows us to design your system in the most optimal way.

Design
The key to a good system is in its preparation.

Knowing the required output of the system first, we then develop the system to produce that output. This differs from many software vendors, who develop the system and then worry about the output later. The advantage of our methodology is simplicity – only what is required is designed. Also, the current detail is not always enough to produce the required output. Knowing what the output is before designing the detail helps us to achieve your required result, faster.

A key ingredient during the design phase is prototyping. This allows you to see and agree the end system before completion, thus no surprises.

Implementation
The same CFO Group consultants that have analysed and designed your system also implement it. The advantage of this is that the true purpose of the system is not lost in translation. Other organisations have many different people involved such as management consultants, business analysts, systems analysts and software engineers. Our approach ensures continuity and consistency.

Training and support
From gaining an understanding of your business, our consultants are ideally placed to provide training and ongoing support. This is important throughout times of business change and staff turnover.