Southwest CFO Services

Our Services

Putting the pieces of your business together

Strategic Finance

  • Optimizing the Finance Function
    • “World-class” where it needs to be, and fit-for-purpose in other areas
    • Integrated with other functional areas
    • Support the optimization and management of working capital assets — cash, receivables and inventory
  • Business Plan creation
  • Access to capital
  • Enterprise/Unit Performance Management, KPI’s and Management Dashboards
  • Long-term plans, Budgeting, Forecasting, and Reporting Strategies

Operational Finance & Accounting

  • Financial Statements and Management Reporting
  • Process assessment and transformation
  • Accelerating the closing process
  • Working Capital optimization
  • Staff assessment and development
  • Maximizing the utilization of ERP / Financial Systems

Specialized Services

Specialized services provide business owner with ways to avoid risk, ensure compliance and address specialized needs in the areas of:
  • Compliance
  • Business Continuity
  • Distressed businesses
  • Financial / ERP systems
  • Audit preparation & engagement management

Strategic Finance

Strategic Finance, also known as strategic financial management, provides long-term planning for ongoing growth and development.

  • Strategic financial management means not only managing a company’s finances but managing them with the intention to succeed—that is, to attain the company’s goals and objectives and maximize shareholder value over time.
  • However, before a company can manage itself strategically, it first needs to define its objectives precisely, identify and quantify its available and potential resources, and devise a specific plan to use its finances and other capital resources toward achieving its goals.

Financial management itself involves understanding and properly controlling, allocating, and obtaining a company’s assets and liabilities, including monitoring operational financing items like expenditures, revenues, accounts receivable and payable, cash flow, and profitabilit.

Strategic financial management encompasses all of the above plus continuous evaluating, planning, and adjusting to keep the company focused and on track toward long-term goals.

 

  • What is the right mix of short- and long-term assets that will ensure the company can both maximize profitability while maintaining adequate liquidity (net working capital)?
  • How will we finance upcoming projects?
  • What are the capital requirements and how will we balance debt and equity? Will these funders come from owners or lenders?

Operational Finance

Operational Finance, is the heartbeat of the company.  Nowadays, a finance department has a broad range of roles to carry out within or outside an organization. The performance and success of any company greatly depend on how well the finance is handled.

Finance Department is the part of an organization that is responsible for acquiring funds for the firm, managing funds within the organization and planning for the expenditure of funds on various assets. It is the part of an organization that ensures efficient financial management and financial control necessary to support all business activities.

The contributions of finance department to any company and how these contributions positively affect organizational performance.  The roles and responsibilities of a finance department include but are not limited to:

1. Bookkeeping

This is the most basic function of the finance department. It involves the day-to-day recording, analysis and interpretation of a company’s financial transactions. This will include the tracking of all expenses (purchases, payments etc.) and sales of finished products.

2. Management of company’s cash flow

It is the duty of the finance department to manage all cash flows into and out of a company and ensure that there are enough funds available to meet the day-to-day running of the company.

3. Budgets and forecasting

In this function, the finance department works with managers to prepare the company’s budgets and forecasts and also give feedback with regards to the financial standing of the company. This information can be used to fulfil the cash needs of each department, plan company staffing levels, plan asset purchase and expansions at minimum cost before they become necessary.

 

4. Management of Taxes

Running a company involves paying tax, and it is the duty of the finance department to handle tax issues. This includes creating good corporate relationships with government by remitting PAYE (Pay As You Earn) to the relevant authority, and ensuring that implementation of tax matters are done within the framed policies.

5. Management of Company’s Investments

Apart from analyzing and selecting new investments, it is also the duty of the finance department to manage company’s existing assets. The finance department should be concerned with current assets apart from fixed assets. The company’s working capital needs to be managed efficiently in such a way as to maximize profitability relative to the amount of funds tied up since it has more implication on the firm liquidity than its fixed asset.

6. Financial Reporting and analysis

Financial reporting and analysis is the function that takes raw accounting entries and transforms them into meaningful, usable and comparable financial statements. The finance department contributes to organizational growth by measuring and reporting on regular bases, key numbers that are vital to the success of the company, and are usually communicated to managers in a logical and understandable format.

7. Assist managers in making key strategic decisions

The finance department provides company management with information necessary to make strategic decisions such as which markets or projects to pursue, the payback periods for large capital purchases, decision on what should be given out as dividend out of the company’s earnings and what to plough back into the business, the best financing mix that could yield the company the nest profit, decision on how to allocate funds to investment etc., thus, making sure that money is being used in the best way.