What is a Finance Strategy plan?
A Finance Strategy plan is integral to the function of any organization as it facilitates allocating and distributing financial resources to meet current and future strategic objectives.
What's included in this Finance Strategy template?
- Financial Vision Statement
- 4x Financial Values
- 4x Financial Focus Areas
- 12x Financial Objectives
- 22x Financial Projects
- 26x Financial KPIs
Who is this Finance Strategy plan for?
A Finance Strategy can be developed by the finance department but can be used by all departments in an organization. All departments must ensure they are sticking to the allocated budget, as well as the targets and actions set to achieve strategic success.
How is this Finance Strategy template relevant to your organization?
You and your team can use this template to set up your company's desired finance goals and accordingly come up with actions each of you can take to finance your strategic plans and achieve your financial targets.
1. Define clear examples of your focus areas
The first step to devising a Finance Strategy plan would be to have an understanding of the areas within your organization that your team and you want to focus on. These focus areas can be divided up per department, or per finance policy, you want to implement to attain your desired strategic goals.
Examples of strategic focus areas that could fall under a finance strategy plan could be Profitability, Liquidity, Efficiency, Resource Allocations.
2. Think about the objectives that could fall under that focus area
What strategic goals do your team and you want to have planned over the next 305 years? Are the goals short-term or long-term? Distinguishing and accordingly setting financial objectives will give your company a solid plan to help move it in the direction of long-term success. Setting financial objectives will also make you aware of potential risks and how to mitigate or minimize the impact of said risk. Depending on your area of focus, these objectives can help you increase revenue, boost profit margins and facilitate making investment decisions.
Examples of some objectives for the focus area of Profitability could be Close the Series A round, Improve the company's cash flow and margins, Seek to attain internal and external growth.
3. Set yourself measurable targets (KPIs) to tackle the objective
Financial KPIs are extremely crucial to providing you with measurable values that provide indicators of your company's financial performance, with regards to expenses, sales. profits and cash flow, as a means of enabling an organization to optimize and achieve its business objectives and financial goals.
An example of KPIs for the objective Improve the company's cash flow and margins could be Reduce accounts receivable, Increase gross margins, Increase operational margins (just to name a few).
Remember it's crucial that all the KPIs you set have measurable goals tied to them.
4. Implement related projects to achieve the KPIs
Projects can be viewed as the actionable tasks of your set goals; they are the jobs you undergo to achieve your end strategic objectives.
A few examples of projects that enhance profitability within your organization could be to contact and set up meetings with VCs; Assisting founders to focus on key drivers of their business; Hire bookkeeping and admin team to handle invoices and payments, and manage inventory; Create a customer discount scheme to recognize early payments; Generate an efficient Project Information Management and Streamline operations (just to name a few).
5. Utilize Cascade tools to track and visualize performance
Whilst projects can be perceived as the actions that help your team and you to achieve your goals, widgets can assist in providing visual aids of the progress of your goals. Setting up widgets on Cascade's dashboards in the form of charts and graphs can help you to track your team's performance on a specific objective.