cope of Financial Management

Financial management encompasses four major areas:

1. Planning

The financial manager projects how much money the company will need in order to maintain positive cash flow, allocate funds to grow or add new products or services and cope with unexpected events, and shares that information with business colleagues.

Planning may be broken down into categories including capital expenses, T&E and workforce and indirect and operational expenses.

• Budgeting

The financial manager allocates the company’s available funds to meet costs, such as mortgages or rents, salaries, raw materials, employee T&E and other obligations. Ideally there will be some left to put aside for emergencies and to fund new business opportunities.

Companies generally have a master budget and may have separate sub documents covering, for example, cash flow and operations; budgets may be static or flexible.

Static vs. Flexible Budgeting

Static	Flexible
Remains the same even if there are significant changes from the assumptions made during planning.	Adjusts based on changes in the assumptions used in the planning process.

• Managing and assessing risk

Line-of-business executives look to their financial managers to assess and provide compensating controls for a variety of risks, including:

• Market risk

Affects the business’ investments as well as, for public companies, reporting and stock performance. May also reflect financial risk particular to the industry, such as a pandemic affecting restaurants or the shift of retail to a direct-to-consumer model.

• Credit risk

The effects of, for example, customers not paying their invoices on time and thus the business not having funds to meet obligations, which may adversely affect creditworthiness and valuation, which dictates ability to borrow at favorable rates.

• Liquidity risk

Finance teams must track current cash flow, estimate future cash needs and be prepared to free up working capital as needed.

• Operational risk

This is a catch-all category, and one new to some finance teams. It may include, for example, the risk of a cyber-attack and whether to purchase cybersecurity insurance, what disaster recovery and business continuity plans are in place and what crisis management practices are triggered if a senior executive is accused of fraud or misconduct.

• Procedures

The financial manager sets procedures regarding how the finance team will process and distribute financial data, like invoices, payments and reports, with security and accuracy. These written procedures also outline who is responsible for making financial decisions at the company — and who signs off on those decisions.

Companies don’t need to start from scratch; there are policy and procedure templates available for a variety of organization types, such as this one for nonprofits.