What Goal Should You Set for Your Finance Team?
If you ask most business owners what their finance team's goal is, you'll usually get one of three answers.
'Keep us compliant.'
'Produce accurate reports.'
'Make sure payroll gets paid.'
Don't get me wrong, all of those matter. I just don't think any of them are the real goal.
If your finance team's objective is simply to produce reports and meet compliance deadlines, you have a cost centre. Not a strategic asset.
So, the real question becomes this:
What is the actual goal of a finance team in a serious business?
→ The Wrong Goal: Accuracy and Compliance
→ The Real Goal: Improve Decision Quality
→ Finance as a Strategic Lever
→ The One Goal I Set for Finance Teams
→ From Scorekeepers to Business Partners
→ What This Means for Business Owners
→ A Simple Test
→ Raising the Standard
→ How CFO Dynamics Can Help
The Wrong Goal: Accuracy and Compliance
Now, before you panic, accuracy and compliance are non-negotiable. They are the foundation, but they are not the finish line.
A finance team that celebrates lodging BAS on time as its primary achievement is playing a very small game.
Accuracy is the entry ticket and compliance is the minimum standard.
If your business stopped at 'the numbers are right', you would still make poor decisions, misallocate capital, over hire, underprice, and misjudge risk.
I see this constantly in manufacturing, construction and distribution businesses. Beautiful reports. Completely underutilised if not outright ignored.
Why?
Because no one defined what the finance team is actually there to do.
The Real Goal: Improve Decision Quality
The real goal of a finance team is simple.
To improve the quality of decisions in the business. That's it.
Every report, every analysis, every forecast, and every KPI should exist for one reason. To help leadership make better, faster and more informed decisions.
If the numbers are not influencing behaviour, they are just for decoration.
A high-performing finance team should be able to answer:
- Are we actually making money on this job or product line?
- What is our true breakeven point including intended owner withdrawals?
- Can we afford this hire based on current pipeline?
- Where is working capital leaking?
- What happens if revenue drops 15 percent?
This is what matters.
Not whether the trial balance ties perfectly on the first attempt.
Finance as a Strategic Lever
When a finance team understands its real goal, its posture changes.
It moves from historian to strategist.
Instead of reporting what happened last month, it starts shaping what happens next month.
In manufacturing businesses, that might look like implementing proper labour recovery tracking and challenging gross margin assumptions.
In construction, it means forward projecting cash flow against committed costs and pipeline probability, not just looking at the bank balance.
In service businesses, it means analysing utilisation, pricing power and wage ratios to protect EBIT before problems show up in the P&L.
This is where finance stops being administrative and starts becoming powerful.
The One Goal I Set for Finance Teams
When I work with finance teams inside client businesses, I set one overarching objective:
Your job is to protect and improve profitability.
Every activity the finance team performs should directly contribute to protecting and improving profitability.
Protect margin.
Protect cash.
Protect capital allocation.
Improve reporting clarity.
Improve forecast accuracy.
Improve commercial understanding.
If a finance team is not consciously thinking about how its work impacts profitability, it is likely buried in tasks rather than driving outcomes.
This requires maturity. It requires commercial awareness. It requires the confidence to challenge operational leaders.
This is what separates bookkeepers from finance leaders.
From Scorekeepers to Business Partners
If you're this far in, and you're realising for the first time in your business you don't quite have the team you thought you did, there is a shift that needs to occur.
A traditional finance function measures the score.
A high-performance finance function influences the game.
That means asking uncomfortable questions:
- Are we under-recovering labour?
- Why has gross margin quietly eroded for three quarters?
- Is this customer actually profitable once you factor in servicing costs?
- Are we mistaking revenue growth for value creation?
These are not compliance questions. They are commercial questions.
Again, don't beat yourself up if your finance team hasn't been performing up to scratch. This is where most businesses underutilise their finance team.
What This Means for Business Owners
If you are a business owner or CEO, here is the uncomfortable reality.
If your finance team is only producing reports, that's not you. Leadership.
You have not defined the goal clearly enough.
You cannot expect strategic behaviour if the expectation is transactional output.
Set the objective properly.
Make it clear that finance exists to improve decision quality and protect profitability.
Invite them into commercial conversations early, not after decisions have already been made.
A Simple Test
Here is a practical way to test whether your finance team is aligned with the right goal.
At your next leadership meeting, ask:
'What decision are we better able to make this month because of the finance team?'
If the answer is vague, or non-existent, there is work to do.
Finance should be shaping pricing decisions.
Hiring decisions.
Investment decisions.
Risk management decisions.
If it is not, you are leaving serious value on the table.
Raising the Standard
The businesses that outperform consistently are not the ones with the most beautiful dashboards.
They are the ones where finance and operations speak the same language.
- Where breakeven is properly understood.
- Where working capital is actively managed.
- Where profitability is dissected, not assumed.
That alignment does not happen accidentally.
It is designed.
It is trained.
It is led.
It starts with setting the right goal.
How CFO Dynamics Can Help
At CFO Dynamics, this is exactly where we operate.
We work with manufacturing, wholesale, construction and service businesses to elevate their finance function from transactional to strategic.
- We help define the right goal for the finance team.
- We implement tools like true breakeven modelling and working capital frameworks.
- We coach finance leaders to think commercially, not just technically.
- We integrate finance into operational decision making.
The result is not just cleaner reporting.
- It is stronger margins.
- Better cash control.
- Smarter capital allocation.
- Leadership teams making decisions with clarity and confidence.
If you suspect your finance team is capable of more than compliance and reporting, you are probably right.
The question is whether you are ready to set the bar higher.
If you are, that is where we come in.
Subscribe to our newsletter
For more tips on increasing revenue and profitability, sign up to our newsletter for business owners, leaders, and finance team managers. Each week, you'll get practical, no-fluff tips and insights in short, easy videos. No corporate jargon, no time wasting. Sign up now.
