Financiers can also be mobile warriors

Mike Risley says there is no reason why traditionally office-bound departments such as finance shouldn't graduate to remote working

While many company departments offer staff the opportunity to work remotely and more flexibly, finance teams often remain office-bound. But resellers should not ignore this department's potential when performing mobility implementations.

Minimising the cost of lost business due to, say, bad weather, epidemics or travel problems has become a pressing issue in recent years. The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) estimates the bad weather in December 2010 cost the UK economy about a billion pounds a day.

The impact of extended finance staff absence can be significant. What organisation can afford to damage cash flow because key credit control processes have been missed, delay raising customer orders or invoices, or fail to complete the month-end management accounts on time?

It has been possible to provide staff with remote access to key systems such as finance for some time. Using a VPN and thin-client technology, employees can log into the corporate network from outside the office. But this requires a significant investment, a sustained commitment from the IT team, and complex security definitions and design.

For most organisations, the cost has been hard to resolve and tough to justify, but the shift away from on-premise systems towards hosting and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) fundamentally changes this, in my opinion.

Organisations can cut IT overheads by hosting their infrastructure with a third party in a secure, well-managed data centre, although there is still an overhead associated with the initial system design, which may deter some organisations.

If vendors are maintaining applications in the cloud, though, there is no need for organisations to ever install internal systems. SaaS applications can be securely accessed by users in any location with internet access. There is no need to make any investment in complex remote-access technology.

With a simple web browser, any member of the finance team can have access to key information such as invoices, credit records and payment transactions at any time or place via phone, PDA or laptop. This will enable remote working in the event of, say, bad weather, a flu epidemic or transport disruption.

It would also provide a platform for flexible working practices, which I believe is increasingly important, enabling organisations to allow employees to work from home some of the time, for example. Such an investment is likely to pay for itself rapidly.

With real-time access to systems, individuals can analyse information, find out what happened with a customer, or ascertain the cash position – whether they are at home, on a train, or in a hotel.

In practice, this can transform productivity. There is no need, for example, for the FD to return to the office from an off-site meeting to complete the management accounts and analyse the cash position. Invoices can be approved, orders authorised and customer credit limits changed from anywhere, enabling more productive and effective working.

With this approach there should be no delay to responding to customer or supplier enquiries that could affect payments and cash flow, or key corporate purchases due to authorisation problems.

Rather than relying on intermittent access to financial reports, senior management may easily view and act on daily, even hourly, cash flow positions, understand recent order history, or notice when a department has gone overbudget.

Making the cultural change may always be a challenge, but SaaS means it can be evolutionary, without any massive upheaval.

With an on-premise system, any change in the way the finance team interacts with the business has to be planned, designed and implemented. It requires considerable project, IT and management intervention.

In my view, once individuals have real-time, anywhere, anytime access to information via SaaS, these changes begin to evolve naturally, without any requirement for corporate strategy or planning meetings.

This progressive adoption of technology will get rid of the fundamental bottlenecks in business processes and provide a catalyst for change. Critically, it will enable finance to shake off traditional constraints and begin to evolve from corporate cost centre to business enabler.

Mike Risley is commercial director of Nolan Business Solutions