3 minute read
Office independence for your Finance Team
Is ‘Office Independence’ Achievable for your Finance Team?
As we continue to adapt to the challenges we face, one thing that we have in common is that 2020 has shone a spotlight on the flexibility of our businesses to adapt to any kind of remote working.
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The capacity to accomplish this comes down to connectivity, flexibility and visibility. Many clubs felt the impact on several levels:
• The sheer speed with which lockdown happened, allowing little or no time to assess their situation or their options. • The expense involved in setting access up – such as via a VPN (Virtual Private
Network) or a Terminal Server/Remote
Desktop – is not negligible, especially if you have more than a few members of staff. • The time it takes to get these options up and running – set up, user configuration, training on use, etc. • Organisations that were not set up to work remotely had to operate with significantly less staff in the office, rather than the full team being able to contribute remotely.
Now that we are adapting to what sport looks like for the foreseeable future, Eureka Solutions, the UK’s leading provide of business management software solutions, is focusing on supporting clubs that just can’t afford to be caught out like this again, and need their systems (and their access to them) to be much more effective to enable them to adapt to the ongoing fluidity of the COVID situation.
How to do this?
It helps to compare this experience to that of their customers that operated on true cloud-based systems prior to lockdown, including St Andrews Links Golf, Powerleague, Luton Town FC and Lane7. One of their NetSuite customers – Derby County FC – has had an experience characteristic of many others, as the club’s Head of Finance, Todd Holt explains,
“Looking back, I cannot begin to think how we would have coped with the rapidly
changing situation if we were not already using NetSuite. Both as a department and a wider business, we were given less than a day’s notice that we would be working from home for the foreseeable future. The cloud-based nature of NetSuite made this transition seamless.
“Since late March, the finance department has been working remotely and continues to have real-time visibility of spend across the various facets of the Club. Basic day to day functions, such as accessing, processing and approving purchase invoices, are undertaken just as if we were in the office.
“The current climate has required finance teams to be fluid in their response to the evolving pandemic and its effect on financial reporting, cost control and contingency planning. Fast, accurate reports, often entailing a range of scenarios, have been produced for departmental heads and the senior executive team, communicating an array of meaningful real-time data which has allowed the Club to be proactive rather than reactive to the ever-changing landscape. This has saved hours of effort performing what would have otherwise been manual and spreadsheet driven tasks.”
Flexibility for the future
As we continue to move forward, true cloud-based systems give finance teams the flexibility to create meaningful scenario plans and react effectively to whatever is down the line.
It is becoming what could be called ‘Office Independent’ – be this across the finance team or for individuals, as the requirement arises.
