Financial & Commercial

Often, HR colleagues struggle with financial skills;

maybe it’s not something that has come up in a previous role, or it’s never come easy to them more generally.. Knowing some fundamentals about finance and budgets can have such a huge impact on your experience in the workplace.

It improves your capacity to make strategic and operational decisions. You’ve always had to learn and adopt new concepts throughout your career – think of finance in the same way. It’s another skill to learn.

Zero Based

If your Finance department ask you to produce a zero-based budget: go for it! This gives you the chance to specify what is and isn’t achievable with the funds available to you.
Value Led

Try to articulate that spending money now will generate a specific, valuable outcome later. Be bold in your approach.
Tracking

Build some simple financial tracking to show that you care about what’s being spent within your organisation. This will build credibility and when the time comes to free up budget, you can present from a position of confidence.

Buy, Sell, Joint Venture

You need to be on the team and in-the-know about any early-stage conversations that are taking place. The warranties, liabilities and assets that are at stake in a deal can be the difference between success and failure. Building and controlling a data room to help agile and assertive decision-making take place is one of the steps to success.

Setting Budgets

Set a budget which represents the ask your business has of you and your team. If you haven’t been invited to do so yet, then you can get ahead of the budget cycle to fully understand what’s being spent where, by who, and why. Challenge existing expenses, contracts that seem to rollover and renew, and look for the value creation you can bring from a different perspective.